The Greatest Musical Cinematic Masterpiece of All Time That Too Few Americans Have Seen
You've never experienced a movie like this one. Quite possibly, you never will again.
The 1964 musical romantic drama, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (in French, it’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), is a paintbox left out in the rain. Here are colors you’ve never seen on a movie screen before, hues and shades and visual pops that leave you beggared for words, pining for a life that actually looks like this: carnation pinks, lemon yellows, reds like the flesh of a sliced salmon; azure blues and turquoise blues and misty robin’s egg blues; whites the shade of old paper, bleached bone, a sun-drenched piazza. Even Catherine Deneuve’s exquisite candy-box blonde beauty becomes part of the aesthetic, another item that ravishes the eye, just as the bittersweet story of two star-crossed lovers ravishes the heart.
It was nominated for five Academy Awards that year, including Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Score (the incomparable Michel LeGrand), which frankly, doesn’t begin to encompass the sheer scope of a film where all the dialogue isn’t spoken, it’s sung.
You might think such a film would be a fluffy little meringue of a thing, best suited to the Sunday, after-church crowd. There is nothing fluffy about The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It takes the uninitiated a few minutes to settle into this new operatic way of storytelling, but in the hands of post-but-just-barely French New Wave writer/director Jacques Demy, the narrative takes over, eventually trumping even the art direction. You care deeply about Deneuve’s Geneviève Emery and her lover, Guy Foucher. The purity of their love transcends all else. And when hard choices must be made, it’s never disapproval you feel, only a sad acceptance that life is complicated, it doesn’t come in a Skittles’ bag of rainbow colors, and at the end of the day, most of us must, and do, adapt ourselves to our circumstances. That might be the most poignant truth of all.
When Demy created his masterpiece in 1964, he purposely chose a type of Eastman stock that offered him the bold colors he was looking for, but at the expense of longevity. Were it not for the enduring love of this classic film, it might not have been remastered at all. Demy understood that his masterpiece might eventually disintegrate, which is why he—brilliantly, I might add—created three main yellow, cyan, and magenta color separation masters on black-and-white negative film stock, which does not fade. This is why we are able to watch his now-digitized sixty-year-old film in all its original splendor.
When I introduced this film to my pierced, tatted-up, power-emo daughter, she flipped. And what joy there is in sharing a story of such tenderness and musical virtuosity with someone who cut her teeth on Cardi B riffs!
Whole new generations are discovering The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, including Damien Chazelle, director of La La Land, his modern-day take on Umbrellas starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Frankly, I was appalled when I saw La La Land—most everyone who had previously experienced Umbrellas was appalled. Stone and Gosling are not Deneuve and Castelnuovo, no matter how cunningly you light the set. But if the blatant ripoff of the concept, storyline, and art direction weren’t bad enough, the addition of tap dancing pushed it so far over the top, it was like cake frosting slathered on top of a pot roast.
In subsequent interviews, Chazelle copped to his obsession with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (apparently, he’s watched it over 200 times), which explains a lot, but it still ruffles my feathers a bit that any production company aspired to improve on perfection. Can you imagine a remake of Citizen Kane? Gone with the Wind? The Maltese Falcon?
Me, neither.
La La Land will be forgotten. To a large degree, it already has been forgotten, but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg will continue to be cherished as the masterpiece it is. If you haven’t already seen it, find it. If you children haven’t already seen it, show it to them. If everyone’s seen it, watch it again, dammit.
Get the tissues, though. It’ll be a good cry.
Have you seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? If so, I’d love to get your take on it. Feel free to leave your comments below.
"Remember that no color, light, shadow, or reflection is there by mistake in a film." I always advise caution on that one, because there are plenty of mistakes in films (though they are likelier to involve the 'mise en scene' and the background.)
There's the Grand Canyon, and then there's Nino Castelnuovo chin.
The trick to preserve the original color scheme really impressed me. People forget how transitory so much of this stuff really is. One of the reasons why I heartily approve of the digital preservation of books in some form or other of cloud storage. For example:
The data from the Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo space probes (and speak to later probes, because I was no longer working in the SFOF when they came along) was all stored on 9-track digital reel-to-reel tape. No more than 10% of that data has actually been read and processed. It is unlikely that any part of the remaining 90% will ever be read, because the machines to read it simply no longer exist, and the tapes themselves have decayed to the point where it likely would make no difference even if someone some how kluged together a reader.
I feel better about never having seen "La La Land."
This right here made me think of a book I just read with a similarly heartbreaking theme: "And when hard choices must be made, it’s never disapproval you feel, only a sad acceptance that life is complicated, it doesn’t come in a Skittles’ bag of rainbow colors, and at the end of the day, most of us must, and do, adapt ourselves to our circumstances. That might be the most poignant truth of all."
Check out Alison Stein's Trashlands, it's a wonderfully thoughtful story, in part, on what it means to live in poverty in a post-apocalyptic Appalachia and how art is something that is critical, no matter the circumstances.