UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG<

Carte blanche is our meeting place for all web cinephiles. Once again, Le Bleu du Miroir welcomes a guest who focuses on a cinematographic or audiovisual theme that is dear to him. For this forty-seventh meeting, we welcome among us Laura Enjolvy, who officiates both in writing, on the Fucking Cinéphiles site, and orally for the Sorociné podcast, which will soon embark on the adventure of paper magazines. She has chosen to give us her feelings about an important film in the matrix of her cinephilia, a classic of French and international cinema.

Carte Blanche to… Laura Enjolvy

November 2012. Today's directing lesson is on Les Umbrellas de Cherbourg. Jacques Demy, I know. Obviously, a film that rocked my childhood. The professor talks to us with passion about THE scene, that of the heartbreaking separation between Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo. An hour engraved in my memory, which will give rise to the desire to discover the film in its entirety. This is how a simple lesson gave rise to the most feverish of passions, that of a colourful, enchanted film, that of the director's universe.

Film in song, film in song

We have the vision of a wonderful film when the title of the film is pronounced, which extends to the filmography of the director. However, if we look more closely, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is not particularly enchanting and even lays down dark social and emotional bases to tell this love story with a tragic end. A rare film reporting on the Algerian war when it was released (1964), the story encompasses a heartbreaking separation, the unwanted and lonely pregnancy of a minor, precariousness, death. Melancholy runs through the film, like an endless song: the painful absence of the loved one, resignation. The desire, the ardor of youth come up against the expectations of society. The dream turns into an all too realistic and sad life. Divided into three acts: the departure, the absence, the return, the film holds the charm of a first love and the cruelty of feelings, a dichotomy between passion and reason.

On the blue poster, where the two intertwined protagonists stand out, is the catchphrase “in music, in color, in-sung”, words that run like musical notes on a score. No spelling mistake, but a neologism invented by the director himself and his composer Michel Legrand, to explain how Les Parapluies de Cherbourg moves away from the “classic” musical comedy, the one we are used to, with well-defined codes. The film wants to be radical and takes the opposite view of this genre which requires us to alternate the sung and/or danced parts and the dialogue parts.

Why can't the characters speak while singing, sing while speaking? An extremism that testifies to a great ambition. The feelings of love then become almost visceral thanks to these lyrical overflows, to the costumes and sets that carry the liveliness of the emotion and the present moment. It is true that love rarely makes concessions, why would it become cautious transposed to the cinema? Jacques Demy films the first emotion as if it were never to disappear and transforms a scenario that could be considered cutesy, into a real tragedy, capable of melting hearts. The music takes on a capital importance, because it transmits empathy to the spectators, plays on the emotions and on the memory thanks to musical themes which recur frequently.

A popular opera

This perpetual movement of song is not, however, an obstacle to the overall appreciation of the work, as one might expect. The filmmaker wanted to convey the preciousness of love as much as the banality of everyday life. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is intended to be a popular opera, far from the bourgeois milieu to which we relate the opera, which anchors its story in a reality that is certainly colorful, but with something tangible, where the marvelous does not find its place. The action never takes place in front of the camera and takes place off-screen (war, sex). Only the consequences of these actions interest this camera, eager to reflect on the expectations of the different characters.

Illusions do not hold in the face of debts, in the face of a murderous war, in the face of a pregnancy which in itself signifies the end of adolescence and the beginning of responsibilities. The love story of the beginning evolves, changes to be only a dream. A story perhaps too naive to survive in this world where hope exists only in the crack of a rain-swept alley. Only reason resides, the gray reason that transforms life into a multitude of balanced choices. The amorous passion is then only ephemeral for the characters, but timeless for us, lucky spectators of the acid but benevolent gaze of Jacques Demy. The film touches us so much perhaps because it transforms such a universal subject into a harmonious stroll, and offers a bridge between the marvelous of cinema and the tragedy of life.

The destiny of two souls weighed down by the weight of social conventions and political urgency, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg seems as solid as the famous umbrellas of Madame Emery, capable of withstanding the most desperate of rains. And to ignite an eternal flame in the heart of a young nineteen-year-old film buff.

Laura Enjolvy

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