Jacques Demy | Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) / 1964

picture perfect

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) / 1964

 

I first saw Jacque Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg upon its original US release in 1964, and I recall still today the wonderful pleasure of experiencing what was basically a pop movie opera instead of yet another French comedy spice up with heterosexual sex or a drama spiced up with heterosexual sex. This was something different.

 

   Since then, I have seen it several other times, carefully swallowing its sentimentality—the director himself admits to his to bring people to tears at the film’s end—without really bothering to consider whether or not this film had anything serious to say.

    This time around, however, the film not only brought tears to my eyes, but, particularly in its beautifully restored condition, affected me on a much deeper level. Certainly in 1964, with the US involvement in Viet Nam, I must have perceived that the central couple’s (Geneviève and Guy, played by photogenic Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo) problems are very much related to France’s involvement during the years that the film documents (1957-1963) in Algeria. 

     Perhaps I had not recognized, however, that Demy in fact structured this film around the way, divided as it is into the chapters: “The Departure,” “The Absence,” and “The Return.” It is the hero’s uncontrollable “absence,” in fact, during which his girlfriend discovers she is the pregnant, that destroys their relationship, pushing them both into marriages with loving but less adventurous companions: in Geneviève’s case, with the jeweler Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) and in Guy’s case with his aunt’s caretaker, Madeleine (Ellen Farmer).

     But I have gotten ahead of myself since for the first third of this film all we see is the splendiferous and truly magical love affair between the two young individuals. Even then, however, we know that their perfect relationship is doomed because of the shopkeeper mother’s bourgeois values. As one of Demy’s friends tells us in a short film about the making of The Umbrellas, a woman who is the daughter of a shopkeeper simply is not permitted to marry a mechanic in the provinces where Cherbourg lies. Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), the girl’s mother, makes it quite clear from the start that she is opposed to her daughter marrying Guy.

    As the mother argues, Geneviève is much younger that she supposes herself to be. And she does not have the resolve needed to bear with Guy’s slowness in writing letters, particularly given the pressures of bearing a child out of wedlock, as it was described in those days. Her mother’s pressure for her to marry the wealthy Roland winds out over her own feelings; and her ignorance what it is like to be at war leads her to believe that Guy is no longer serious about their relationship.

   Geneviève chooses a passivist route, declaring she will marry Roland if he accepts her being pregnant. A reasonable and kind man, who is also very much in lover with the young girl, Roland easily wins her over.

    In a sense, accordingly, the tears that fall at the end of this sad tale are rather pointless. Both Guy and Geneviève are perhaps better off with the mates they have finally chosen or have been chosen for them. Yet we sense in that touching last scene—acted out in the cleanest and brightest of Esso stations ever in existence—that Geneviève is, as the French might say, somewhat trist, a bit resigned by her fate, and that Guy, particularly in his refusal to see his “daughter,” waiting I the car, and his final statement that it is time for her to go, that he still feels some bitterness.

     A moment later, however, both turn to their children with obvious joy and pleasure, so that we know that any grieving they feel is a passing feeling. Like so many of Demy’s films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, logically speaking, ends quite happily.

     Perhaps our tears emanate not so much from the resultant loves of the two major characters, but from the exquisiteness with which their earlier love was portrayed. To me, it now appears, the true wonder of Demy’s work is not its fragile story nor the soap-opera emotions of its characters call up, but the sheer perfection of the fantasy world that Demy has created.

      In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Demy has whipped up a Hollywood-like operetta that even outdoes Stanley Donen’s and Gene Kelly’s lavish spectaculars, or the musical splendors of Vincent Minnelli. If Demy appears to be blind to the wonders of dance in this work (he makes up for that in his later Les Demoiselles de Rochefort with Gene Kelly as one of its stars) his set designer, Bernard Evelin, is a magician. Composer Michel Legrand’s lush chords and easy to assimilate melodies, with his occasional jazz interpolations, demand even less from the listener than do composers like Gershwin, Loewe, or Bernstein but offer up almost as much pleasure. Despite the seeming oddness of a full operatic film, Demy’s work seems so perfectly artificed that we do not for a moment think it unusual, without even the early shock of the moment when we first see the Jet gang in West Side Story break into dance.

     The work is so grandly theatrical that it doesn’t even matter, at moments, that the two lovers float down streets without even moving their feet, of that, because all actors had lip-synced the pre-recorded score, their movements were so precisely timed that they were allowed no opportunity for improvisation; or, finally, that in that very last scene Geneviève’s “detour” has taken her more than five hours in the opposite direction from where she has begun her trip. The Cherbourg of Demy’s opera is not any more real than the plastic model of the toy Esso station that Guy keeps in his bedroom. In Demy’s world everything, even the raindrops, are as carefully timed as the tears Deneuve admits she found difficult to produce as Guy’s train pulls away in the first “Departure” act of the piece. No matter, we cry in her place, not so much out of sadness for the events of the story I now believe, but because we have at the end to go back to our real worlds.     

     And there lies the rub. Any queer person watching this fantasy immediately knows that the true hero is not pretty Geneviève, but the very sexy Guy, who after all has served his country only to be dumped by a girl unable to live up to her convictions of love and only far too ready to abandon herself to an older and wealthy man who will financially protect her and her child. While this film superficially presents itself as a heterosexual fantasy, accordingly, it is actually a coded queer one, centering on Guy the outsider who eventually finds love in the arms of a much kinder and less traditionally pretty girl—read another “boy”— who has long had to keep quiet about “her” secret love for him. Together they have forged a squeaky clean new life that might be at home in Kenneth Anger’s vision of Kustom Kar Kommandos of only a year later. Notice, that Guy and Madeleine (read Matty) celebrate their Christmas in the Esso station at film’s end.

     At one point, early in the film, the director even visually hints at the alternatives that exist for Guy even while he is closely hugging a dismayed Geneviève. There’s that quite boy coming down the or the sailor waiting, his face turned to the wall.

     Demy, a bisexual (married to filmmaker Agnès Varda), mostly gay man, who died of AIDS at age 59 in 1990, has reversed the gender of the usual Hollywood heterosexual melodrama—wherein it is usually the woman (think of Ginger Rogers as Kitty Foyle or Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas) who lack the social status and behavior to keep their wealthy lovers—here representing the bourgeoise by Geneviève and her mother with pretty boy Guy being the outsider. Any queer viewer automatically sides, I would guess, with Guy, even if we might feel sorry for the decision his former lover has had to make. If we cry, it is not for sadness, for but the happiness that Guy has found despite his ostracization from the protected society that the umbrellas of Geneviève and her mother provides. We can only feel a sense of relief that Guy has not been entrapped in the relationship with Geneviève whose mother would certainly have demanded that Guy seek other employment and that big, beautiful Esso station would have remained only the toy version of his dream.

     The beautiful and innocent girl of the early part of the movie is now a well-dressed woman in a bouffant hairdo has gotten the life she deserves, going miles out of were way just to remind herself of what she has lost.

    As Steve Erikson summarized in 2024, long after I’d written the above review:

 

“Demy and fellow filmmaker Agnes Varda had been married two years when he made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. However happy they may have been, the film’s narrative reflects the pain of being unable to publicly embrace a part of one’s sexuality. It offers several variations on the closet. At first, Guy and Genevieve conceal their dating from her mother. Although Roland genuinely likes Genevieve, their marriage is a convenient way to take care of her daughter and avoid the stigma of being a single mother. The theme of being unable to follow one’s heart to its seemingly logical conclusion is a universal one — after all, life has a way of interrupting the plans we make — but as expressed by a queer man, its resonance is more specific, even in a film about heterosexual romance. The melancholy arc of the story bears the mark of an outsider’s perspective on marriage.”

 

      By film’s end, Guy is the man who got away, the gay boy who has found a new, more fulfilling life. In 1964, Hollywood was still four years away from ending the Production Code, replacing it with an age-based film rating system, so Demy had no other way to tell his “gay” story but through the coded tale, as he had done in previous in Dead Horizons, Lola, and Bay of Angels; but this time he clued us in by making sure we understood that the story about love he was telling was not real one, but a kind of fairy-tale, an obviously artificed simulacrum representing the real world where a high school couple might break up for reasons other than simply going off to battle and not growing up on the right side of the tracks.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2015; revised November 13, 2025

Reprinted from World Cinema Reivew (November 2015) and My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).