“I wanted to make people cry. […] And I succeeded! I was pleased.” This is how Jacques Demy describes his Palme d’Or-winning movie musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in a making-of documentary interview he gave to the BBC in 1972. Pleased he must have been indeed, as the film enjoyed huge critical and public success, with a whopping 1.2 million box-office admissions in France and five Oscar nominations overseas—a double triumph that many of his peers from the French New Wave movement, with which he was especially associated through his 1961 debut feature Lola, had not been granted.
At first glance, the story is one we all know too well: a young woman and man fall in love, promise to be with each other until the end; but then life happens, and they both marry someone else. An umbrella vendor’s daughter, Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve, only twenty-years-old at the time of filming), and her gas station worker sweetheart, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), certainly fit the mold of ill-fated young lovers—but Demy’s film covers far more ground than that. Behind the bittersweet love songs and bright colors exists a modern, class-conscious narrative, with the Algerian War casting its shadow across it.
