I decided to watch a film starring Catherine Deneuve. Obviously, Les parapluies de Cherbourg is considered a classic. I didn't know much anything about it, so I was initially a bit flabbergasted by its form - oddball musical. Do they sing all the time? Yes they do. And those quite ordinary-sounding lines are not usually what you expect from musical numbers and those numbers are hardly "songs" anyway. As I am not a fan of musicals I wondered whether I could sit through this. I could, and, for all my suspicion, I enjoyed it! The story is pure melodrama, of course. Girl meets boy. Girl is pregnant while boy is sent off to war. Girl meets another man. Etc. I liked this film because it was unexpectedly weird. Jacques Demy plays with colors and contrasts and he (along with set designers & the cinematographer & maybe even choreographer) is really successful at that. For example, bright & extravagant pastel colors lend an almost surreal feel to the interiors which makes the effect of the icy blueness of some of the outdoors scenes or the desaturated grayness of the images towards the end of the movie even more striking. Props and locations are used in a really inventive way to create what ultimately becomes a sort of shaky fantasy world (Jaques Tati's Mon Oncle comes to mind). Everyday objects are allowed a role that is very unusual in conventional movies - I think of things such as wallpapers, tea pots, covers.
Everything about this film has the ring of artificiality. It's artificial to the extent that I start to look for political subtext, but maybe that is going too far. Anyway, I'd like to watch some Douglas Sirk movie soon if only I can get hold of one.
I finally decided that this is a good film when even the ending frame was ambiguous in plenty of ways. I expected something more conventional. All in all, there are tons of amusing details to marvel at (ordering white wine when fleeing one's misery in a debaucherous drinking binge).
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