Master Class: Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”

I live in a rainy city. Even today, after a week of perfect sun that seemed to serve as a prelude to summer, the skies opened and I found myself digging out my rain coat again. That’s what happens when you live in a port city. And with the closure of this year’s Cannes Film Festival on my mind, with a French film victorious, there was no better time to see Jacques Demy’s classic 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

On the surface, this seemed like a simple love story when I first saw it years ago. The young man, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) is in love with 17-year-old Genevieve (the luminous living legend Catherine Deneuve, in her breakthrough role). He’s a mechanic who dreams of opening his own garage. She works for her mother in the town’s only umbrella boutique, which is on the verge of financial ruin. They talk of marriage, although her mother disapproves (he has only a sickly godmother, thus completing the familial economics of the story). Figurative dark clouds appear overhead in addition to the rains: the Algerian War is raging several hundred miles away, and he must serve. “I will wait for you”, she sings to him, repeating “je t’aimes, je t’aime, je t’aimes” repeatedly as his train takes him away. While Guy’s away, a wealthy jeweler has his eye on Catherine, and the separation and other circumstances conspire to keep the young lovers away for good. I haven’t even mentioned that the whole has nary a line of spoken dialogue, as everything is sung beginning to end, and it finishes in a lightning-fast 90 minutes.

Few films dared, even musical ones, to become full-scale operettas where every word was expressed in song. Even the most famous of musicals had great dialogue and witty exchanges. Not so in Demy’s enduring love story. Demy had the incredulous notion that the whole thing would be sung, and he was fortunate to find a supportive producer who saw his vision completed. The film was a smash in Paris, claimed the Palme d’Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival, and proceeded to storm the world, culminating in global success, a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack, several Academy Award nominations and an invitation for Demy to live and work in the United States, which he happily accepted. And yet Cherbourg remains his most revered masterwork. Why is this?

The secret lies in the film’s simple structure: a boy and a girl in love, torn apart by life circumstances and choices, but not by plot machinations or something as convenient as deus ex machina. When Demy collaborated with Michel Legrand for the film’s now-famed score, they stuck so faithfully to the idea of a three-hanky-weeper that they wrote at which points in the film each of the three figurative hankies should actually be taken out. The operetta format elevates how we see and experience young love for the first time, when everything in life tastes, smells, feels and sounds that much better. There is nothing else in the world but love. Emotions are heightened and never stop, even when the emotions swell and contract, for better or for worse, and Demy understands this. The music, while constant, doesn’t come at your relentlessly. Instead, it is as gentle as the tide, ebbing and flowing, but it never stops. It may have a sweeping orchestral suite throughout, but it’s also heavily jazz-influenced. Regardless, the two genres make compliment each other seamlessly. This is a seemingly small charmer of a film that grows into a grand masterpiece and reminds you of how you felt in that first brush of true love, and how heartbreaking it is when it doesn’t work out. The film’s coda, which I won’t give away, gives closure, is almost unbearably cruel, but also accepting of the hard choices we make in life, without judgment.

Cherbourg was filmed in eye-popping gorgeous colour schemes. The town feels just a bit more lived-in than most film musicals of the era. You could sense that people actually lived there and that it wasn’t just a film set. Demy knows that such a simple touch made the film connect that much more to the audience: this could happen to even the most uncomplicated people you know, and it’s a complete heartbreaker when life intrudes. There’s an expression that God likes having a laugh when people make plans for the future. While religion doesn’t figure heavily in Cherbourg, one is reminded that compromise and making do are what shapes our experiences and makes us into the people we are. The film’s final scene, when Guy and Genevieve meet under circumstances more complicated than they are, is a coup de grace of such delicate balance that if the emotions were glass, they’d be smashed to smithereens.

Who says life is simple? It’s not, and you must be prepared for any circumstance. That’s what life in Cherbourg is like, just as it is in my city. In both cases, carry an umbrella, just in case. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is available in glorious DVD and Blu-Ray. Watch it with a box of Kleenex. This is one weeper that earns its tears honestly.

Modern Film Classic: La Femme Nikita

It’s been twenty years since the year 1991 brought to the cinema a new, stronger female image. The trend was unofficially started by Jodie Foster’s brilliant Oscar-winning performance as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, which still ranks as one of the greatest horror thrillers of all time. Her character may answer to male higher-ups, but she was no shrinking violet and has a will wrought in iron and steel. Just a few months later, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon rode a blue T-Bird into history in the remarkable road film Thelma & Louise. Linda Hamilton’s Sarah in Terminator 2 showed she was steelier in body and mind than any man around her (cyborgs exempted). Each of these women advanced the female cinematic image from pure object of desire into powerful beings that would sooner kill than kiss a man.

Into this mix, one may have forgotten the prototype for the modern femme fatale: Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita.

Nikita v. 1: Anne Parillaud

Starring Anne Parillaud in the title role, Nikita documents the journey of a strung-out junkie who kills a policeman during a drug raid. She is a creature so feral and enslaved by her primal instincts that she stabs a policeman through the hand with a pen during a routine questioning. When she is sentenced to life in prison in the film’s opening, she rips the banister off the witness box in the courtroom and requires ten men to restrain her. Nikita wakes up in a nondescript white room fit for a mental patient, and is told that her history has been wiped out. The French intelligence had staged a mock funeral for her and she is given the option of either becoming a trained government assassin, or she will be put in her fake plot, for good. She opts for the former.

Parillaud plays Nikita as the banshee from hell whose bite is far worse than her bark. Uncontrollable and responsive only to force or threats, she actually bites her martial arts instructors. She gets dirty and one gets the sense that she might even eat flesh and blood if that’s what it took to survive. Eventually, she is tamed by a psychologist. The film’s stunning centerpiece is an epic assignment to take out a foreign diplomat at the very restaurant she is taken to for her birthday dinner. In time, Nikita is released and returned to civilian life – albeit under an assumed name and occupation – falls in love, and remains a sleeper assassin. But every so often the phone rings, and a familiar voice summons her with a certain password, and her other life takes over.

The iconic little black dress

Originally released in France in 1990, Nikita was a blockbuster and was unlike anything seen in cinema. While action films of the period concentrated on muscled man as superheroes (think Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Van Damme), there were no women portrayed on screen in such a manner. Nikita was not only considered a bold exercise in style, given what then passed as cinema vérité-style technical direction and camera work, but it dared to portray a woman as having more animalist tendencies than men. The Nikita figure wasn’t a formerly benign individual developed into an imposing assassin or fighter a la Sigourney Weaver in the Alien quadrilogy. Considering that this was an era where American cinema was heavily into the Madonna/whore dichotomy in film, Nikita was no mere breath of fresh air. It was, together with the representations in the first paragraph of this essay, a gale force that threatened to blow the doors off the movie house. The film, although it did not break out into the mainstream, was an art-house smash and attained a cult following that led to its presence in pop culture that still continues.

Cannes Film Festival 2011: A Preview

Cannes 2011 Poster

Note: Post has been updated as of 16:00 PDT on Tuesday, May 10, 2011.

In April 2010, the Blogger had the rare opportunity of meeting a true international star. The enigmatic and talented French singer Charlotte Gainsbourg launched her first-ever concert tour in Vancouver at the famed Vogue Theatre to promote her critically-acclaimed second album IRM. She did not disappoint. Thanks to the generosity of local cultural paper The Georgia Straight and Warner Records, I met Charlotte herself after the show. She was effusive and charming, and a bit nervous. I asked her flat-out if, as the reigning Best Actress winner, she would be attending the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival. Gainsbourg looked a bit taken aback and then replied, with a twinkle in her eye, that she was “unsure”. Sure enough, a month later, she was on hand on the Croisette to present the biggest award of the festival, the Palme d’Or.

The annual Cannes Film Festival, now in its 64^th year, is not the biggest such gathering in the world, but it lays claim to being one of the oldest (after Venice) and most prestigious. This is the festival where Bridget Bardot once played in the surf in front of an international cadre of admiring paparazzi. This was where the film that gave rise to the word “paparazzi”, Fellini’s immortal La Dolce Vita, scandalized the Catholic Church and won the top prize, birthing an international sensation and helping popularize European cinematic discourse in North America. This was where notorious Danish director Lars von Trier won prizes year after year but showed his displeasure at not winning the Palme d’Or by first giving the jury the finger one year, and telling them seven years later that they gave him “the wrong award” for another film. Gong Li all but became an unofficial spokeswoman for the festival due to her annual appearance to in support of director Zhang Yimou’s films in the early 90s, every one in which she played a leading role. Sharon Stone never misses the Festival, whether or not she has a film to promote. This is where Catherine Deneuve, Maggie Cheung, Juliette Binoche and, yes, Brangelina come to be seen and to present serious work. To get an idea of the international star power on hand, have a look at this clip.

This year’s festival boasts one of the most exciting lineups in years. In particular, the Blogger is looking forward to the following films in competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or: