Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher, a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery, an employee in her widowed mother's chic but financially embattled umbrella shop. On the evening before Guy is to leave for a two-year tour of combat in Algeria, he and Geneviève make love. She becomes pregnant and must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of cinema's most singular achievements — a film in which every single line of dialogue is sung, yet it avoids the bombast of traditional musical theater in favor of an aching, quotidian naturalism. Jacques Demy's conception is utterly distinctive, and Michel Legrand's score is inseparable from the film's emotional texture. Cinematography earns a 4 for its ravishing use of saturated color — costume, set, and frame are choreographed into a visual language that mirrors emotional states with breathtaking precision. Novelty is equally exceptional: the sung-through format combined with an anti-spectacular, bittersweet romantic realism is completely one of a kind. The ending — that bittersweet, snow-dusted service station reunion — is among the great endings in cinema, devastating in its restraint and emotional honesty. Acting is competent and expressive but largely in service of the concept rather than conventionally virtuosic. The plot is deliberately simple, almost fable-like, which is both a feature and a minor limitation — it earns a 3 rather than a 4 on its own structural merits.