Drama · Romance
French (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg)
1964 · Directed by Jacques Demy · 93 min
In the port town of Cherbourg in the late 1950s, a young car mechanic and a girl who works in her mother's umbrella shop are deeply in love. Then the Algerian War intrudes on their plans. Every line of the film is sung, in a world of saturated colour.
Why it matters in cinema history
A defining French musical of the 1960s, it connects Hollywood's song-and-dance tradition with the personal, modern cinema of the New Wave era. It showed the musical could be intimate and political, not only escapist.
Watch with intention
Treat the singing as ordinary speech that has been given music, and watch how colour and melody carry the feeling the characters hold back.
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