As is often the case with sequels, “the same but different” is the big idea in the musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort), the 1967 follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg).
Largely it’s the same production team as on the 1964 movie – writer/director Jacques Demy, composer Michel Legrand, producer Mag Bodard, costume designer Jacqueline Moreau and production designer Bernard Evein. They gussie up this film in much the same way as they did the previous one. Bright lights, bold colours, big sets, grand camera movements, and locations tweaked till they squeak with pastel excess.
Catherine Deneuve is the only key cast member to survive from Umbrellas. She plays a different character here, Delphine, who runs a dance school for tots alongside her sister Solange (Deneuve’s real-life sister Françoise Dorléac). The sisters are happy, as far as it goes, independent and successful. But they pine for more, more, more… of life, love and excitement. Most of all they want to go to the big city.
Handily, here come George Chakiris and Grover Dale as a pair of roustabouts who work on a travelling fair, to inject a bit of glam into their lives, the possibility of love, and a touch, in the shape of Chakiris, of that West Side Story pizzazz, not to mention some of its dance moves (so many vaults into the air with one leg extended).
Enter also, in another nod to the mothership, Gene Kelly, as a, yes, American in Paris – or on his way there at least – a composer whose short stay in Rochefort will give him the opportunity to sing a few songs, dance a few numbers and show that, at 55, Kelly still has it (the toupee helps).
Kelly is instrumental in getting the story – borrowed straight from opera’s big book of silly plots – from A to Z, which involves the girls’ mother, played by Danielle Darrieux, confronting some misaligned romance in her past. Enter also Michel Piccoli as a man called Simon Dame. The fact that his name is Monsieur Dame is the cause of much sniggering among the women and turns out to be a key driver of the narrative, believe it or not.
Unlike Cherbourg, Demoiselles is not sung-through. There is talking in normal voices between musical numbers, which aligns it more with the American musicals of old that Demy and crew are homaging. Though there had been big Hollywood musicals in the 1960s like My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and West Side Story, it’s clear that what Demy and co are aiming for here, as they did in Umbrellas, are the likes of Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Watch Kelly get the Singin’ in the Rain camera treatment when he dances. Notice Deneuve and Dorléac dressed like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in their big number together.
Kelly speaks French well but it’s not his voice when he sings. Apart from Darrieux the entire cast have singing stand-ins, but it’s done well. You’d not know.
There is a lack of a strong throughline and often the film appears to be killing time between musical numbers. Chakiris and Dale begin to look increasingly like spare parts – their flirtations with the two young women are a touch half-hearted. They also fail to heat up the screen. Perhaps it’s the matching tight white trousers they wear, which make them look like rent boys on an awayday.
Ultimately, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the better film. Better, more hummable songs, the bold decision to go sung-through, subject matter unafraid to go dark – which gave it tragic heft. On the plus side here: the lush strings of Michel Legrand’s arrangements are memorable. The silken camera of DP Ghislain Cloquet, whose early black and white cinematography for Robert Bresson and Jacques Becker would not, you’d have thought, have marked him out as a natural for this sort of lush spectacle. But most of all props go to the production design and the way Bernard Evein transforms the town of Rochefort-sur-Mer on the west coast of France into a fairytale realm of impossibly bright hues. Everything in this movie is artificial and proudly so.
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
