Every line of dialogue in this film is sung. This is the premise, and it sounds like a conceit — the kind of thing that wears out its welcome in thirty minutes. It does not. By the time you reach the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, you will have entirely forgotten that speaking this way is unusual, and the final scene will arrive and take something from you.
Catherine Deneuve plays Geneviève, seventeen years old, working in her mother’s umbrella shop in a provincial French city, in love with a mechanic named Guy who is about to be conscripted. The story that follows is not what you expect from a film this beautiful. Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand, who wrote the score, understood that the most devastating thing you can do with music is use it to carry ordinary sadness — grocery lists and practicalities and the small negotiations of life — and let the beauty of the form do the emotional work that the characters cannot.
The film is shot in supersaturated color — aquamarine, coral, lemon yellow — in a way that reads as both dreamlike and intensely real. The color is not ironic. It is genuinely lovely. And that loveliness makes what happens to the people inside it hurt more.
Watch it in French with subtitles. The English dub robs it of everything. Have a second drink ready for the last ten minutes.
VERDICT — The most beautiful film about loss you will see this season. The final scene is as good as cinema gets.
POUR — Champagne, obviously. Or sparkling water if you want to feel the full weight of it.
MOOD — Tender. Aching. Grateful to have watched it.
Worth owning, not just streaming. Find it on Blu-ray.
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