The Umbrellas of Cherbourg The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Koch Lorber 1964 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 91 87 min. / Les Parapluies de Cherbourg / Street Date April 6 2004 / 24.98 Starring Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey Cinematography Jean Rabier Production Designer Bernard Evein Film Editors Anne-Marie Cotret, Monique Teisseire Original Music Michel Legrand Produced by Mag Bodard Written and Directed by Jacques Demy
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson If The Red Shoes sent a million girls to ballet lessons, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg re-popularized taking French in school. I have fond memories of my sister coming home from a French class field trip to the art theater in the next town to see this splendid operetta. Considering the level of culture where we lived, it must have been a revelation. Somewhere life was beautiful. The French language practically sounded like it was being sung anyway. This enormously popular movie was a hit with all but the most die-hard Musical haters. Instead of aping the MGM style Jacques Demy extends his lyrical romantic-philosophy movies (Lola, Bay of Angels into a musical realm. Michel Legrand provides a beautiful set of musical themes in a pop mode and the result is a unique film with a timeless theme. Anybody who remembers the painful impossibility that usually accompanies young love will respond. The show made an instant star of Catherine Deneuve. Synopsis: Cherbourg, 1957. Geneviève Emery (Catherine Deneuve) is sixteen and madly in love with garage mechanic Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo) but their plans to marry are scoffed at by her mother Madame Emery (Anne Vernon) and scotched by Guy's draft notice: he's to go fight in Algeria. Complications ensue beyond the fact of the lovers' separation, especially when the wealthy, kind diamond seller Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) comes into the picture as a potential rival: Madame Emery sees him as a cure for their financial woes. Jacques Demy in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg essentially reinvents the operetta format. When people aren't flat-out singing they're speaking in rhythm to the melodies. The direction and especially the vivid color stylize the film just enough to make it all work. Even though the streets, apartments and shops are basically naturalistic, the candy colors and manipulation of elements (mostly rain and snow) are all carefully orchestrated. We accept Demy's melodic world as easily as we accept ballet dancers in Manhattan in West Side Story. The story is placed solidly in the Jacques Demy romantic universe of suffering and ecstasy. Yet another generation of lovers learns the painful lessons of the heart. The experience of parents and others who have gone the same route before mean nothing. As in the masterpiece Lola, every heart has to experience love for itself and take its chances. These people are certainly pretty, but they're far from perfect. Geneviève is sweet and sincere but also susceptible to doubt and self-interest. Visually, Ms. Deneuve is such a perfect fairy tale princess that I've heard audiences gasp at the character's marriage, as if Geneviève had personally betrayed them. Geneviève's mother is a familiar type from Demy films, the attractive older woman with just enough unrealistic vanity to think that the handsome young swain wants to propose to her. She pressures her daughter but also is not a villain, having remembered her own mistakes in early romances. Guy initially comes off as blameless. The Algerian war is given the rap for his lack of timely communication, which is a bit of a cheat. Guys Don't Write used to be the rule, which may have changed for the better forever with the advent of the internet. Or maybe not.  1 When he returns, Guy mopes and sulks until he's helped by the interest of another woman, Madeleine (Ellen Farner), the unsung heroine of the story. She's rewarded for her quiet faith like a character by Jane Austen. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was an eye-opener for American teens raised on movies with puritanical morals or oversensationalized themes. Anybody trying to organize their love lives around pictures like Blue Denim or A Summer Place would be heading for disaster. Demy acknowledges the obvious truth that blue-noses deny: Young people fall in love and have sex. When they have sex, rational thought rarely guides them. Just Say No is a slogan for fundamentalists and fools. In Umbrellas we see the young lovers in crisis, slowly drifting through the streets. They are standing still but moving completely unrealistically, as if pulled by an unknown force. We know exactly where they're heading yet the movie doesn't wave any flags of cosmic disapproval. It just happens. Just because it is sad doesn't make it any less beautiful. Later on, Guy allows himself to be picked up by a woman in a bar. He sleeps with her. They part. That's it - the skies don't open up with a curse (as they of course now can, with STDs). This kind of thing didn't happen in retribution-soaked MPAA fare. Avoiding total chaos in one's life is probably a good idea, but movies like Umbrellas acknowledge the human truth that when it comes to love, most anything seems to be possible. Demy's romantic philosophy is universal. Young hearts will be broken; people will make mistakes. The ones left behind will find other partners but will know forever what they've lost. The last episode of the film brilliantly expresses the confused emotions we feel about the characters. It's sad and happy at the same time. We don't assume that Geneviève's marriage is a bad one or that Guy is unreasonably bitter. Things happen and people make choices, and that means that some separations have to be forever. Who knows if Guy and Geneviève would have worked out? Perhaps Guy wouldn't have learned how to be faithful to his second love, without having first experienced the loss of his first. I've not mentioned Roland Cassard, the link between this movie and Jacques Demy's wonderful movie Lola. My review of it goes into that subject in full detail. Suffice it to say that it was years after Umbrellas that I saw Lola, and the experience was a shock. Roland Cassard's musical theme is the same one used in Lola. The scene where Roland tells of his past, with its cut to the location from the older picture, just chokes me up, so I guess I'm a confirmed softie. Cassard always seemed the villain, the interloper, when he's really just another traveller looking for happiness and trying to be decent about it. Madeleine may wonder if Guy dreams of Geneviève, but Geneviève must know that Roland still pines for someone else, even if he's never told her about Lola. Nobody sings for themself in this picture, and for the most part it's all entirely convincing. Just to be obstinate, I've listed the singing roles from the IMDB ... they're half the performances, after all: Danielle Licari = Geneviève Emery José Bartel = Guy Foucher Christiane Legrand = Madame Emery Georges Blaness = Roland Cassard Claudine Meunier = Madeleine Claire Leclerc = Aunt Élise Koch Lorber's DVD of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is good news all around. Criterion's old laserdisc and the earlier Fox-Lorber DVD were both time compressed (PAL conversion?) and slightly cropped at the sides, and this release solves those problems (I think!).  2 The enhanced picture frames compositions neatly at 1:78 and the main titles no longer go off the screen. The picture was possibly protected for 1:66, but I don't see anything wrongly being cut off. The fact that more is visible above and below on old VHS tapes is irrelevant. The enhancement also helps keep the colors from buzzing - on the earlier discs some of those crazy wallpaper designs wanted to stand up and walk around the frame. There are a couple of weaker scenes but most of the movie looks great for color and detail. The contrasting settings leading to Guy's apartment pop off the screen and the concluding snowstorm no longer blurs into fuzz. I was almost getting used to the incorrect faster speed of the earlier disc but the music here sounds great. Whatever they've done to it, it no longer distorts in the louder passages, including the big orchestral finish with the last choral note. Legrand's score never sounded better. The synchronization appears to have improved as well. The film print comes appended with various restoration credits that add twenty seconds to the running time. The disc's one extra is a pleasant excerpt from an Agnes Varda docu about her director husband Jacques Demy. In it we meet the producer of Umbrellas - a woman - and see Anne Vernon, Nino Castelnuovo and Mirelle Perrey at the re-premiere of the movie. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg rates: Movie: Excellent Video: Excellent Sound: Excellent Supplements: episode excerpt from Agnes Varda's The World of Jacques Demy Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: April 3, 2004 Footnote: 1. Though it has little or no discussion of politics, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a great anti-war movie. It's guys like Guy who get sent away to be killed leaving lovers to deal with the loss. I saw this film just as it was becoming apparent that I had to make some choices about Vietnam. Staying home with Geneviève or Madeleine or even the café pickup Ginny is the better choice, believe me. Return 2. A note from Jason Minnix, 4/04/04: Hi there. I just read your review of the new Koch lorber disc and since my old Fox Lorber one was close by, I threw it in my computer's DVD drive: the running time is 87 minutes and approximately 15 seconds (give or take a few seconds there). Hope that's of some help (and hope this means the new disc definitely isn't time-compressed). My wife & I both love this movie, & I've been hoping the new disc would be an improvement. - Jason Minnix Note: 87.25 to 91.5 is almost exactly the difference between PAL and NTSC, so until told otherwise, Savant is saying this new disc is not sped up and runs at a correct 24 fps. 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