The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg (or, Singing In The New Wave)

Do you remember videotapes? Remember how precious they were when you needed to tape something and you couldn't find one? Remember when you would grab one in desperation and your sister would claim that you couldn't tape on it because she had taped A Country Practice three weeks ago and hadn't watched it yet?

One tape I had locked up and off limits contained on its magnetic spool Goddard's À bout de souffle. It sat there for an eternity. It was going to be my entrée into the French New Wave but I never got around to watching it.

Last night, on a whim, I decided to side-step Goddard and slip my toes into the New Wave by way of Jaques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. It was divine.

A colour-saturated sing-a-long doesn't scream New Wave but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg does toy with the conventions of the established musical genre in eschewing the overblown and concerning itself with a decidedly mundane, down to earth plot just like its more illustrious cousins. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve in her prime) is in love with Guy (some good looking frenchman in her prime), mother doesn't approve and complications ensue.

It's not a musical per se. There are no songs, no dance numbers, no set pieces; the closest thing you'll probably get to describing it is an opera without the arias. It is pretty much entirely recitative, there is not a spoken line to be found. The music ranges from snappy jazz to the grandiosity of the epic movie scores of Hollywood.

The effect of pairing the banal and the operatic is beguiling, and the colours, well...



The beauty of the film is that what it leaves unspoken unsung rings true. To say too much would spoil the experience so all I'll say is that in the end The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is compellingly human and manages to stay in your head far longer than you ever would have expected at the outset.

Now I feel like a swim. New Wave fest anyone?

Tags: movie review, New Wave, France