Critics reviews

I find it to be kind of punk. It’s such a spectacle. I’m so blown away by the colors and the richness of the visuals—it’s like watching candy.

Amidst the film’s unyielding craft, Deneuve’s red eyes are like a violent crack in a heavily controlled façade… it’s as if the film’s thick, exquisitely colored curtains were suddenly pulled apart just enough for a timid slit of sunlight to come through and dramatically change every tone, every shade.

This and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT are noted for their use of color, but the schemes are distinct. In the latter, sunny pastels and bright whites obscure any hint of grimy realism. In THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, which is more operatic in tone and structure, Demy utilizes bolder, more primary colors. This further allows for hints at the film's fateful bitterness. All that glitters is gold in Demy's world, but his is a gold that illuminates the screen while revealing its own artifice.

Could this be the saddest musical of all time? One of the greatest films ever made in any genre, Jacques Demy's masterpiece tells of a great love that turns out not be a great love at all... Michel Legrand's occasionally lilting, occasionally thundering music works in tandem with Demy's alternately intimate, alternately sweeping cinematic style to create a film that is often elusive and unexpectedly complex — and never not breathtaking.

When I first saw it, newly married but still remembering vividly the pang of adolescent crushes, it played as tragedy: the story of a young love snuffed out by war, fate, and economic hardship. Over the years, seen in the light of Demy's other films, it has come to seem more properly an exaltation of life's bittersweet balances and trade-offs—of unexpected triumphs made richer by the dashed hopes that offset them.

It's not just an exceptional musical, it's a genuine advancement in the genre. With every line of dialogue sung, it's essentially operatic, but its distinctly cinematic features are what make it a truly great movie... Add Jean Rabier's Eastmancolor cinematography, which color-coordinates interior spaces, clothing, and seasonal shifts, and the film is simply a spectacular sensory achievement.

Jacques Demy is a cinematic alchemist. Ever present in his body of work is an uncanny ability to transform or combine standard, even banal, elements of various genres into 'gold'--or, rather, something so luminous and rarefied that it can only be Demy who's created it. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is arguably the best of his films, and almost certainly the first film of his to so fully bend genre and style convention.

Beneath the jazzy pop and aching strings of Legrand's orchestrations is laid the brutal essence of the couple's dissolution: War separates them, and economics makes their reunion all but impossible... Through its poignant finale, a virtual snow-globe scene in a nighttime gas station, Demy and Legrand give their unhappy love story a depth that, beneath the tinsel and Technicolor, only comes with a beating, broken heart.

The film is only a musical at the level of sound – the lines of dialogue become lyrics simply by virtue of being sung to Michel Legrand's sublime score that shifts between big band brashness and sweeping romanticism. This tension between the fantastical utopia of the musical and the more realistic style of the visuals and dialogue is duplicated in the doomed romance narrative, which sets the idealism of love against the disappointing pragmatism of reality...

Deneuve, in pastel cardigans and hair ribbons, leaves us sobbing as she says goodbye to her boyfriend, called to fight in Algeria; when they see each other six years later at a snow-blanketed Esso station, the actress, now sporting the intricately engineered bouffant and all-black ensemble of a joyless bourgeoise, destroys us all over again, her character's youthful exuberance completely supplanted by adult resignation.

When Roland comes to dine with Genevieve and her mother, the three of them sit at the table, forming a triangle. Roland in black on the left, Genevieve in bright pink on the right, and Madame Emery at the head of the table, between the two of them, black dress and pink gauze shawl. She is black and pink, and while this is entirely pleasing aesthetics-wise as she compliments the attire of the other two, her black-and-pinkness also denotes her role as intermediary...

The simple story line provides few novel ideas on human love and disappointment, but the film's bombastic melodrama and gorgeous pallet of pastel hues, which provide an ideal back drop for the radiant beauty of a twenty year old Catherine Deneuve, are full of potency.