Demy's Restored 'Umbrellas' is a Campy Delight

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

directed by Jacques Demy score by Michel Legrand starring Catherine Deneuve at the Brattle Theater through July 11

In this era of outrageous, genrebending, over-the-top films, it seems imposible that a mere "musical" first released in 1964 could shock our desensitized ninties selves. But the newly re-released "Umbrellas of Cherbourg," a sung-through, "faux technicolor" kitsch-binge, is downright obscene in its shameless, ecstatic campiness.

Totalitarian tackiness extends to every aspect of this lighter-than-air film. The plot is lovingly predictable. Sixteen year old Genvieve (Catherine Deneuve) is leered at by almost every male in the village of Cherbourg where she works in her mother's umbrella store. She falls for the earnestly handsome automechanic Guy(Nino Castelnuovo) who ruins everything by being drafted. Before leaving for Algeria, he somewhat deviously impregnates her, perhaps to be sure she'll 'wait for him'. But his plan backfires when the pregnant, helpless Genvieve is married off to the rich, wolf-like diomand dealer Roland Cassard (Marc Michel). Guy, of course, is devastated, and also, in the logic of such things, returns to Cherbourg a cripple.

This surreally cliched plot is made even more hyperbolic by the fact that it is indeed sung. All the way through. In French. To the accompaniment of a synthetic, Esquivel-esque cocktail jazz. For the English-speaking viewer, the experience of watching auto mechanics lip-synch their way through so much ear-coating ultrasynth reaches that special level of pleasurableness which is just shy of unbearable.

The score and plot are mimed-out with plucky good-naturedness by the cast, which is completely dominated by its women. Deneuve looks so breakably pure as Genvieve, replete with little bows and white gloves, that even she seems relieved by her deflowerment. Her feline mother slinks about in tight black cocktail dresses and blood red suits, exuding sheer power via over-ripe sensuality and bartering Genvieve off to the highest bidder. Madeline, the 'plain girl' whom Guy eventually settles for, looks exactly like the goody-good martyr she is, with immaculately well brushed hair and the inevitable hairband. Measured against these luscious charicatures of the many faces of woman, the two male characters are almost obliterated.

Demy seems to stress the over-welming aura of these females by a variety of visual tricks. Several times the women are dressed in the same garish material as the walls before which they stand, so that their bodies appear to disappear and their heads and arms seem to bob like other-worldly banshees in midair. Visual indulgences like these are the delight of Demy, whose Cherbourg is a radioactive collection of tuqouise, yellow, red and lime-green. These colors radiate from the outsides and insides of the buildings and on the clothing of every man, woman, and child who passes on the street. Even the mechanics wear azure blue shirts under their coveralls. The effect is like that of looking into a bright light and then shutting one's eyes: the color appears and reappears on the shut eyelids, refusing to be forgotten.

Splashed color is not the only cinematic self-indulgence on the part of Demy. He also treats the audience to a variety of trick shots which to the contemporary eye seem comical in their overtness. As the lovers stroll through Cherbourg singing their famous duet, it is obvious from their utterly still arms and legs and their perfectly even gliding motion that they are not walking at all but being towed on a dolly, though the shot shows only their upper halves. An attempt to innovate on the diaolgue scene has one of the actors singing directly into the camera while the other is shown in a mirror; the problem is that the utter lack of emotion of the actor addressing the camera contradicts the schmaltzy lyrics and the resulting effect, rather than being striking, brings the house down.

It is hard to know with how much irony "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" was originally meant. At times, the film does have a sort of post-modern self-consciousness, such as when a merry mechanic sings that he can't stand singing and that he much prefers movies without singing, or in the final shot of the gas station marquis, which reads not "Cherbourg" but "Cherbourgeosie". Luckilly, theoretical issues like these cannot weigh down this proudly frothy film. Demy's Cherbourg was nearly lost to this world when the original negatives were damaged and the prints all faded to unintelligablity--his widow and the score's composer Legrand remastered "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" from surviving remnants. How grateful we should all be for the chance to freebase on this pure, unadulterated kitsch, this seven-gun salute to the blonde virgin in a pink frock and matching bow which lives, at some level, in all of us.