The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Original title

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

Directed by

Jacques Demy

Genre

drama film, musical film, romance film, melodrama

Country

West Germany, France

Runtime

1h 31m

Rated

PG-13

Rating

7.4 of 10 from 895 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Two young lovers in Cherbourg are separated when the man is drafted to fight in a war. Told entirely through sung dialogue, the story follows the woman as a single mother and the choices she must make while he is away.

romanticmelancholicsing-throughvisually lushbittersweetlyricalyearningoperatictender

What happens

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (French: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) is a 1964 musical romantic drama film written and directed by Jacques Demy, with music by Michel Legrand. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo star as two young lovers in the French city of Cherbourg, separated by circumstance. The film's dialogue is entirely sung as recitative, including casual conversation, and is sung-through like some operas and stage musicals. It has been seen as the second of an informal tetralogy of Demy films that share some of the same actors, characters, and overall atmosphere of romantic melancholy, coming after Lola (1961) and before The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Model Shop (1969). The French-language film was a co-production between France and West Germany. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d'Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, making it the only film of the French New Wave to do so. In the United States, it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 37th Academy Awards and four more at the 38th ceremony including Best Original Screenplay (Demy), Best Original Score (Demy and Legrand), and Best Original Song for the film's main theme, "I Will Wait for You". It was later adapted into an English-language stage musical. In 2018, a BBC Culture critics' poll ranked the film at number 51 in the Top 100 Greatest Non-English Films of All Time. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Tonio Kröger (1964)
• Les Pas perdus (1964)
• Marriage Italian-Style (1964)
• Anatomy of a Marriage: My Days with Françoise (1964)
• Divided Heaven (1964)
• Angélique, Marquise des Anges (1964)
• The Train (1964)
• Graduation Year (1964)