The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg is timeless proof that musicals can be enchanting and deep

It’s the contrast that makes the film work: the melancholy realties of normal life juxtaposed with the saturated fantasy of how we wish things could be. “People only die of love in the movies,” Geneviève’s mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), tells her 17-year-old daughter when she’s separated from Guy, who’s sent away to do two years of military service in the Algerian War. Love-struck Geneviève doesn’t die when she’s separated from her first love, the man she pledged to marry and raise a family with. Nor does Guy die in the war, the way he might in a more conventionally tragic musical. The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg is interested in the complexities of real life, not the easy outs of melodrama.

Yet Umbrellas doesn’t mistake realism for cynicism either. There are no villains in Demy’s deeply empathetic world. The wealthy jeweler who vies for Geneviève’s heart while Guy is away (Marc Michel playing the same character from Lola) isn’t a nefarious ne’er-do-well. He’s just a man who’s learned that the passions of first love are sometimes less important than the practicalities of commitment. The plainer girl (Ellen Farner) who Guy at first overlooks doesn’t have Geneviève’s vivaciousness, but there’s a different kind of steeliness to her spirit. A different kind of beauty. As Guy’s and Geneviève’s young lives unfold from the fall of 1957 to Christmas 1963, they each make their own compromises, sometimes with an air of regret but always with a sense of conviction. “Don’t worry about my life, Mother,” Geneviève announces in what could be seen as her lowest moment. “I have no intention whatsoever of wasting it.”

That Demy doesn’t demonize any of his characters is what makes the film bittersweet in the truest sense of the word. The richly saturated romantic comedy world of the first act isn’t a trick; it’s just one lens through which to view life and love. A lens that shifts and changes as we grow older, but maybe—hopefully—never entirely goes away. Umbrellas optimistically suggests that our lives aren’t bound by forces beyond our control. We have agency in our fates. “I want to be happy with you,” one character tells another in a scene that’s both quietly pragmatic, and, in its own way, deeply romantic.

There’s an ethereal quality to The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, both in its tricky tonal tightrope and its glorious visuals. Which is all the more impressive when you consider the logistical difficulties of its production. None of the actors do their own singing in the film, which makes them more akin to silent film actors than regular performers. Although the cast worked with their voice doubles to shape the feeling and rhythm of their performance, on set they couldn’t change so much as an inflection or moment of timing in the pre-recorded tracks. Indeed, because the entire film is set to music, Demy and Legrand essentially had to stage it as they wrote it—factoring in how long it would take someone to cross a room before delivering their next line of dialogue, for instance. Yet all you see in the final film is spontaneity and liveliness. Like an onstage musical, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg is an effortful production designed to look effortless.

The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg eventually builds to a moving end point that can be read any number of different ways. “Is this the saddest happy ending in all of movies, or the happiest sad ending?” Jim Ridley asks in his Criterion essay for the film. “The beauty, and profundity, of Demy’s vision is that it’s both.” The final scene is truthful, not didactic, with a score that contrasts with the onscreen performances in a compellingly enigmatic way. As Demy’s wife and fellow legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda mused in a 2008 documentary, “I think Jacques really understood the ambiguity of emotions.”

The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg won the top prize at Cannes, and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Score, and Best Original Screenplay. As The A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd points out, adoration for the film has only grown over the years, especially since modern restorations have revived the richly saturated colors and lush soundtrack that originally made it so special. Umbrellas had a big cultural moment in 2016, when Damien Chazelle cited it as one of the main inspirations behind La La Land—another movie musical that looks at the realities of life through a heightened fantasy lens, although one that has a much more conventionally hummable score than Umbrellas’ unusual recitative.

In many ways, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg stands as a curio: a unique cinematic operetta experiment that even Demy himself could never quite replicate in his subsequent movie musicals. But in other ways it’s a loving tribute to the lesser celebrated side of the musical genre—the emotional depth that can only come from setting feelings to music. Legrand’s “I Will Wait For You” joins the likes of The King And I’s “Something Wonderful” and Company’s “Being Alive” and “Sorry-Grateful” as ballads that are at once wholeheartedly earnest and emotionally complex. With its mix of clear-eyed realism and pop art fantasy, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg offers a love story as complicated as any big screen romance, comedic or dramatic.

Next time: Silver Linings Playbook swept the Oscars at the rom-com genre’s lowest moment.