You’d think a French film festival that prides itself on recognizing cutting-edge filmmakers would have given plenty of top prizes during the 1960s to French New Wave directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, neither of them ever won the Palme d’Or. Instead, the Cannes jury recognized the more user-friendly achievement of New Waver Jacques Demy, whose Umbrellas of Cherbourg was a sung-through musical modeled on classic, candy-colored MGM musicals.
Of course, Umbrellas is a lot more wistful than its Hollywood predecessors; its two young lovers fail to keep their promise to each other to let nothing separate them. The film made an icon out of its 20-year-old star, Catherine Deneuve, while composer Michel Legrand’s lush romanticism made him an in-demand tunesmith in Hollywood. The movie seemed revolutionary at the time, but despite Demy’s similar success with 1967’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (reuniting him with Deneuve and Legrand), it marked a path not taken.
Musicals made since then have retreated from the through-sung and the tragic to the more conventional, old-school Hollywood style. Today, Demy isn’t as well-remembered as other French New Wavers (though his widow, filmmaker Agnes Varda, who is on the Cannes Camera d’Or jury this year, keeps his flame alive), but Umbrellas remains an unforgettable movie-watching experience.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Unnx5eLbk]