Cinema: Esso Operetta

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a triumph of taste, spirit and style over a plot drenched with soulful cliches. This splashy, sparkling French musical, in which every word is sung, is attuned to the sensibilities of sad young lovers who like to contemplate futility while walking barefoot in the rain. The film delights the eye, but it gives the mind very little to feed upon.

In rainy Cherbourg, Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) keeps slipping away from her mother’s umbrella shop to meet an ardent garage mechanic, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). Guy goes off to the war in Algeria, leaving Genevieve pregnant. When she doesn’t hear from him, she lets her mother marry her off to a sober young jewel merchant. One Christmas time years later, the lovers meet again briefly and find themselves virtual strangers. Genevieve is now a chic, prosperous Parisienne. Guy has acquired a pleasant wife, a son, and an Esso station he can call his own.

The audience may justly snicker a bit when this climactic encounter is interrupted by a uniformed station attendant who sings: “Shall I fill it up, Madame? Super or standard?” The sound of Muzak lyricism in the score is for the most part standard. There are no songs as such, but the script, in rhyme translated by prosaic subtitles, weaves themes of love and despair into insistent patter music that accompanies every utterance from “Je suis enceinte, Maman” to “pass the sugar.”

Despite its seeming effort to imitate operetta, Umbrellas is essentially pure fable, cleverly edged with pessimism. By exercising a stylistic savoir-faire that saucily regards faults as virtues, Director Jacques Demy transforms it into a film of unique and .haunting beauty. Suspended in silvery rain above a cobblestone street, the camera peers down at a crimson umbrella that is soon jostled by others into a colorful mosaic. Again, the tumbling of carnival masqueraders past a plate-glass window adds ineffable poignancy to Actress Deneuve’s tranquil blonde perfection as she waits for Guy. And in her wedding scene, wearing a maternity bridal gown, she is the exquisite embodiment of every girl who ever traded her first careless rapture for a bit of tangible security.

Demy not only risks the commonplace, he makes simplicity almost a fetish, disarms the audience with ingenuousness. Like a kid with a handful of bright new crayons, he scrawls his sadly cynical fairy tale across the shabby landscape of the town. Through his eyes Cherbourg becomes a city of promise done up in candy-box decor, where every shopfront, boudoir and corner bistro has been daubed with gentle pastels or vibrant reds, yellows, pinks, blues. This is the way things ought to be, he wistfully suggests, not yet faded with the passing seasons into the greyness of things as they are. Hollywood has been performing such tricks for years, but rarely with so graceful a touch.