‘The Young Girls of Rochefort’ — ‘Les Demoiselles de Rochefort’ (1967)
Jacques Demy’s musical follow-up to ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ is a riot of pastels, romance, and dancing–with a dark edge
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964) starts with a self-referential wink: as characters are finishing their shifts at an auto repair shop, one sings he’s going to the opera, and another responds he prefers the movies. Jacques Demy’s film is, of course, both. Every line of dialogue is sung, and the film is extremely tightly choreographed, partly because they recorded the film’s soundtrack before filming and the actors had to match the score.
Demy’s 1967 film The Young Girls of Rochefort shares much with Umbrellas, including the intensity of its color scheme, music by Michel Legrand, and a story of romance. But Young Girls is structured much more like a classical American musical with set pieces knit together by spoken dialogue. It also has an additional fairy-tale quality that comes into relief when compared with Donkey Skin (1970), another Jacques Demy/Catherine Deneuve film, which joyfully indulges the trappings of medieval fantasy as it tells the unsettling story of a princess trying to escape an incestuous fate. Though Young Girls has no magical animal hides, it…
