The Movie Moment: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

When I first saw Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg about ten years ago, I was blown away. So much about the movie transfixed me — the glorious Michel Legrand song score, the candy-colored visuals, and of course Catherine Deneuve as Genevieve, the picture-perfect embodiment of innocence, and later, of innocence lost. But one aspect of the film I wasn’t sure of was the jewelry salesman Roland Cassard, played by Marc Michel. After Genevieve’s boyfriend Guy is drafted to fight in Algeria and Genevieve discovers she’s pregnant with his child, Roland proposes marriage to her despite her pregnancy, and after some pressure from her mother she eventually accepts.

One moment involving Roland that I’ve always loved comes when he first asks Genevieve’s mother for her daughter’s hand. As Roland sings a song about his first love, Lola, who spurned him for another man, Demy cuts to a shot in which the camera dollies around a promenade with a balcony. The first time I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I assumed it was a stand-alone story, and so I interpreted this shot simply as a poetic image to accompany the story Roland tells.

I discovered my mistake a few years ago, when I first saw Demy’s debut feature Lola. Roland is the principal male character in that film, which finds him a few years younger and living in Nantes. As it turns out, the promenade we see briefly in Umbrellas was actually where Roland and Lola said their goodbyes to each other before they each left town, with the camera movement in Umbrellas tracing where they had once walked. In addition, the tune Roland sings during the scene in Umbrellas is the musical theme associated with his character in Lola.

It wasn’t until I saw Lola that I was able to make up my mind about Roland. Previously, he had always come off as something of a sadsack — not someone who willfully swoops on Genevieve at her most vulnerable, but the kind of stable gentleman who a woman in need of a husband will sometimes settle for. But after seeing Roland lose his own first love, it dawned on me that the two were better matched than I’d originally thought. I’ve seen enough of Demy’s films to recognize lost love as a prevailing motif in his work — heck, Lola turns up again in his 1969 film Model Shop — and I’ve grown to sympathize with Roland, one of Demy’s most archetypal characters.

But beyond getting more familiar with Roland as a character, I think in the years since I first saw Umbrellas, I’ve grown to appreciate the sort of man he is. In Demy’s films, life has a tendency to get in the way of the passions of the young, making them sadder but wiser. When I first saw the film, I rooted for the young lovers Genevieve and Guy, but I’ve grown to accept that life is rarely as simple as we’d hoped in our youth. The great films grow with us, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is definitely great. — Paul Clark

The Screengrab : jacques demy

The Movie Moment: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)