[Correlating with the Indianapolis Museum of Art's 2010 Winter Nights Film Series, ZapTown will be publishing essays each week on the films that will be shown in the series.  The museum will be presenting The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg on Friday, February 13. The show starts at 7 p.m. - $9 Public/ $5 for Members and students with ID. For a full schedule, visit the IMA's website (http://www.imamuseum.org/toby) or our Lead Story on The Toby (http://www.zaptownmag.com/2009/12/lets-go-out-to-the-movies-the-toby - film schedule is located at the bottom of the article).]

Past Essays on ZapTown:

The Blue Angel
Nashville
Arsenic And Old Lace
Touch of Evil
The Dirty Dozen

It has been years since I announced my love of the French New Wave. The style and the unintentional unity of the directors all led to an historical movement that was as fascinating as say the bebop movement in jazz or how abstract expressionism was to art.

Ever since that first time I saw 400 Blows and François Truffaut’s vision of old Paris, it got to me deep inside. The stark black and white images showed the degree of mysterious romanticism within the city, yet an underlying neo-realistic approach being blanketed around Antoine Doinel’s life. What Truffaut saw of his city was the impression of how I would experience being in his city.

And not only did I feel like I knew the streets of Paris, I felt like I knew Doinel. We followed his life from adolescence (The 400 Blows) through his youthfulness (Antoine And Colette) and into his adult life (Bed & Board).

Not as heavy a contributor to the French New Wave movement as Truffaut, Jacques Demy has something in common with the Cahiers du Cinema director. Like Trauffet, Demy used some re-occurring actors, themes and look in his films. This recycled environment made sense being that a large contribution was a trilogy of romantic films.

It would have made more sense for the Indianapolis Museum of Art to follow up Touch Of Evil with 400 Blows, being that Truffaut was directly influenced by Welles’ film noir to make his own masterpiece. But being that Friday is the kickoff to Valentines Day weekend, it’s only natural to focus on the romantic film and there is nothing more romantic then french film…or is there?

The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964) is the middle of the trilogy — a musical — the first film Lola (1961) and the last, The Young Girls Of Rochefort (1967). If you dig into the specs, in a six degrees of separation sense, you will find that the names for Demy’s film Lola  came from Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, which was the first film in the 2010 Winter Nights Series.

Uninterested with what Jean-Luc Godard was doing, especially with his Rayndian science fiction dystopia of Alphaville, but interested in doing something just as unique and visual, he turned to the musical to create his most famous contribution to filmmaking.

The film takes place in Cherbourg surrounding a boutique where Madame Emery (played by Anne Vernon) and her daughter Geneviéve (played by Catherine Deneuve who went on to star in The Young Girls Of Rochefort) sell umbrellas. Geneviéve ends up falling in love with Guy (played by Nino Castelnuovo). Guy is drafted in the Algerian War, and after leaving, Geneviéve discovers that she is pregnant. Isolated and abandoned, and through the consorting of her mother, she agrees to wed Roland Cassard, who was seen wooing the lovely Lola only to be rejected. Even though Cassard understands that she is carrying someone else’s child, he continues with the agreement.
Through many plot twists and turns, it leads back to her having to deal with the realities of seeing Guy again. Through all of this, it is apparent that this is not your typical musical. The harsh realities of the film, give it the feel of a tragedy, much like Casablanca did. The characters become victims of the everyday realities of life.

All’s fair in love and war, and when it comes down to it, doesn’t all romantic dramas have a sense of tragedy to them? In the end, someone wins and someone loses. It’s the natural balance of human nature and this film clearly shows the realistic nature of love in a society that is torn apart by externalities.