The Brooklyn Rail

Decembers were made for my favorite film, Jacques Demy’s and Michel Legrand’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), opening December 6 at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration. December: the weeks-long return to home and roots, either missed or repulsively omnipresent. Warm fuzzies, depression, the cross-cuts between both. Perhaps a nostalgia-stoking cold. Reflections on the year that has passed; remembering childhood dreams. Maybe you will react to it just as Kurt Vonnegut reacted when he first saw it on September 27, 1965 at an Iowa cinema: “I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.”

With the return of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to US screens, we can reconsider the genius of Jacques Demy, who should be ranked alongside artists like Jean-Luc Godard, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Agnès Varda (his longtime spouse and creative partner until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1990) as one of cinema’s unimpeachable mavericks, albeit a modest one, without the sweeping snare-kick bravado of, say, a John Cassavetes, a Chantal Akerman, or a Michael Snow.

In the sixties and seventies, Demy was ubiquitous, and, as Carrie Rickey’s recent biography of Varda tells us, his films were, in his lifetime, more widely seen and disseminated than those of Varda, who often struggled to secure funding for her work. In recent years, however, Varda has received her overdue laurels, hailed now as a titan of independent cinema, a feminist innovator until her last breath, a champion for those directors, especially women, who worked outside the conventional production methods of the movie studio. Demy, by contrast, has yet to be fully reckoned with as a strange, unruly modernist in his own right—perhaps owing to the seemingly more Hollywood-ish, bright, accessible look of his movies. Demy’s aesthetic is evident not only in his iconic colorful musicals—Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Donkey Skin (1970), Lady Oscar (1979), and Une chambre en ville (1982)—but also his dramatic works, like Lola (1961), Bay of Angels (1963), Break of Day (1980), and his curiously anguished slice of LA neorealism, Model Shop (1969). Cherbourg and Rochefort, as well as Lola, Model Shop, and Une chambre en ville, are the works upon which he secures his legacy as a lyrical, dream-oriented, bitterly hopeful chronicler of mid-century melancholy, both personal and political. The product of unexpected strains in French cinema, Demy is what would have developed if the dream-obsessed, poetic, and excess-intrigued Jean Cocteau had conceived a child with the ruthless, sharp master of ellipsis and suggestion, Robert Bresson. It is in Cherbourg, Demy’s most “perfectly” realized masterpiece in a career full of them, that his peculiar worldview found its popular apotheosis.

Cherbourg tells us that love, the unconscious, history, all are located in song—the beyond of speech. And in Cherbourg, there is always singing. At one point, the two teen lovers, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve, her breakout role), attend the opera, Bizet’s Carmen. They like it, but more memorable is when Guy pricks his finger on a pin while trying to hug Genevieve. In the first scene, one of Guy’s mechanic buddies sing-says, “J’aime pas l’opéra—le ciné, c’est mieux!” Don’t like opera; cinema is best. Demy’s film tries to bridge the two media: only when we raise every line and gesture to the limit of operatic pathos will we understand the cruel real world around us.

Chez Demy, what inspires epiphany is the act of singing, not speaking. A Demy protagonist does not exist until they resort to melody—and even then, they are at the mercy of a realm (in Cherbourg, of colonialist conflict, class struggle, and the separations wreaked by time and a waning memory) that might not register the notes. I sing, therefore I might be. Demy’s dictum to composer-best friend Michel Legrand, according to Jean-Pierre Berthomé’s 1982 biography Jacques Demy et les racines du rêve (“the Roots of the Dream”), was: “Let’s organize this melody and we will have singing. I don’t believe opera will lead us to making a popular film, because you can never understand what is being said. Let’s try to find, cinematically, an equivalent to the opera where each word is comprehensible, clear.”

The story is clear. Boy meets girl, boy dates girl, boy is drafted to fight in the war in Algeria, boy and girl promise to wait for each other until he returns, boy and girl don’t quite wait for each other, boy returns, a void reigns once filled by declarations (hasty ones) of love. Within this narrative, Demy organizes a film of such pristine, carefully thought through mise-en-scène, it makes one swoon in awe just recalling it. His characters’ voices are all overdubbed, and they move with the slashing precision of animatronic dolls in cuckoo clocks. (Demy’s first job in film was animation.) But the reality of the emotional situation—how a daughter deals with loss, how an unprepared mother deals with the burden of a daughter—is thoroughly explored; Demy’s characters, particularly the two lovely characterizations of Deneuve and especially Anne Vernon (as Genevieve’s widowed mother), are fanatical in their need to maintain, amid all the singing, blaring wallpapers, and crimson dresses, an air of mundane, pared-down decorum. Note the flat way Vernon caresses her hand through Deneuve’s hair as Genevieve, falling to her mother’s feet, announces her imminent separation from Guy, as if to signal a mother reacting in real time, genuinely unsure of how to react. (Demy’s second job in film was documentary, making short films about country priests and humble cobblers.)

Demy’s inspirations were Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau, Max Ophüls and Walt Disney. In other words, Demy finds order in the disorder of dreams. He neatly lays out elements of a possibly liberatory fantasy of love, like the dead fish and alluring grapes of a Dutch still life: the crushing Real whose limits we cannot acknowledge (yet which lies before the viewer, plainly, simply, like a letter from a French colonizer soldier in Algeria or an Esso gas station with the twisted but brilliant pun “Escale Cherbourgeoise”), brushes up against manic bursts of singing, otherworldly colors, and pared-down dialogue in which a simple bonjour, when sung, bears the weight of eternal dissatisfaction with the quotidian. An explosive suspicion builds up in the viewer as they watch Cherbourg: the world can be more than what we unimaginatively make of it. We can sing our thoughts. Inside a room, we can feel love, by way of a remembered melody (“I Will Wait for You”), even when the love between you and I has long gone.

Demy’s best stylistic flourish is his constantly tracking camera which preserves space in graceful long-takes. His phlegmatic gaze registers life as suffering; it accepts this fact, and, from this, other poetic worlds can be built. A screamingly melancholic air pervades the most painful yet natural breakup in movie history. Demy dollies and tracks slowly, murderously forward, across barely addressed traumas. He unfurls his story in past and present, marking Cherbourg as a cinematic exploration of time as thoroughgoing as anything by Alain Resnais. Note the breathtakingly devastating five seconds it takes Anne Vernon to quickly suppress her own prospects of falling in love with a new possible suitor, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel, the hero of Demy’s debut feature Lola) as she makes it her goal to achieve her daughter’s happiness. I feel like all of life is in these five seconds: between Vernon’s first shocked “Oh!” (the shattering of dreams) to the next cool, accepting “Mais, non monsieur…” (the acceptance of death). The reason: survival. Or maybe this is a performance.

I first saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in my freshman year of college, 2014, and I was left in a state of shock and stupor. I didn’t know a movie was allowed to do this, to look and sound and move like that, to end so crushingly yet lift you to the sheerest heights, to be so self-consciously simple but never simplistic. I continuously returned to it. I would fall asleep listening to Michel Legrand’s score. I had an idea of what love looked like, and stuck stubbornly to it, leading to disaster, a separation—and no hope of a reunion inside a dirty gas station. The ideas have since been revised. A gap was left, where the sun, silence, and death met. Regrets. Melancholy. Impossible to forget. How liberating it was, is, to hurt, to feel incomplete, and to continue desiring the utopia imagined by Elizabeth Bishop’s Buster Keaton: “Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands / and everything works. / I am not sentimental.” It has been ten years since I discovered the world of Jacques Demy. I’m writing a study on him. I know that in this meager tribute called “writing” I shall never arrive at the bottom of his world—and this fact fills me with a ravishing joy. I’ve seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg now sixty-five times. Maybe the sixty-sixth time, I shall know how to mend the gap.