The Umbrellas of Cherbourg |  | Director: Jacques Demy
Actors: José Bartel, Michel Benoist, Georges Blaness, Dorothée Blank, Pierre Caden
Studio: KOCH LORBER FILMS
Category: DVD
List Price: $24.98
Buy New: $13.36
as of 9/8/2010 23:23 EDT details
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Seller: cddvd4u
Rating:  121 reviews
Sales Rank: 17266
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Original recording remastered, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Subtitled), French (Original Language)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Discs: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Running Time: 91 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 741952301493
ISBN: 141720026X
UPC: 741952301493
EAN: 9781417200269
ASIN: B0001BMLUA
Theatrical Release Date: December 16, 1964
Release Date: April 6, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Young lovers are separated through misunderstanding.
Amazon.com
Thirty years after its release in 1964, this poignant romantic drama, in which virtually all of the dialogue is sung, was badly in need of restoration. The bright colors had faded and washed out in a haze of pink, and the film stock had badly aged. Fortunately, the movie was properly restored to its original splendor and rereleased to worldwide acclaim. Not only was this French romance a daring musical experiment (because the entire screenplay is a kind of epic song, beautifully scored by Michel Legrand), but it also introduced Catherine Deneuve, who was 20 years old when the film was released and became one of France's all-time screen legends. Deneuve plays a young woman in love with a local auto mechanic named Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) who has been drafted into the army. In his absence she learns that she is pregnant and then marries a rich man who agrees to raise the child. The bittersweet story follows what happens when Guy returns from service. To reveal anything more would be a disservice to anyone who hasn't seen this touchingly heartfelt film. --Jeff Shannon
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 121
 Fantastic plot set to great music and vivid imagery.. August 26, 2010
phiLip 2 (VA USA)
If it takes forever, I will wait for you. This is the best chick flick of it's genre that I have ever seen.. the music is perfect and it's a beautiful story.
Never gets old... February 12, 2010
Peter Hawthorn Binkley (VA USA)
I love this film.
I teach high school French, and show this film at least once a year. I am spellbound every time I watch it. The music and choreography are brilliant and the story is thought-provoking. When you start the film, it looks like another sappy romance, but...
Well, I don't want to spoil it for you. Watch this film!
Simply Beautiful December 30, 2009
Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas)
"The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" ("Les Paprapluies de Cherbourg")
Simply Beautiful
Amos Lassen
It was 1964 when I first saw "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and it has always been on my list of favorite movies. It is a beauty of a movie with a wonderful score and beautiful color--it is a feast for the eyes and the ears. Michel LeGrande wrote the score which replaces the dialog and Jacques Demy ably directed this work of pleasure. The film stars Catherine Deneuve (when she was 20) and she plays an ingénue who falls in love with a mechanic. He is called to war in Algeria after she becomes pregnant and we are there with her while she must decide whether or not to wait for him.
There is, as I said, no dialog. The entire film is sung and we are taken to a world filled with bright colors, joy and sadness. The script is direct and to the point. Some may find the singing silly but I found it delightful and although I cannot put my finger on what it is, there is something quite beautiful yet unrealistic. For one thing everyone is quite beautiful and the sets are wonderfully colorful. The world is turned on its head--poor people wear beautiful colored and expensive clothes, the clothes match the sets.
The plot is quite ordinary but it is straightforward and not complicated. The real charm of the film is in the way the story is told. This has to be one of the most romantic films ever made with fascinating color and exquisite music.
un' etoile December 19, 2009
E. M Oreta (quezon city, m.m. Philippines)
A gem. In a scaen, there is a song that starts, "Quelle beaute.." and it is. Michel Legrand's and Jacques Demy's first collaboration is a visual dream. Such beautiful people, Catherine Deneuve and Anne Vernon. They seem to eat ponly carrots and lettuce and although financially hard-up, dress in such beautifully expensive clothes.
The story line has been described to death, so let me just describe the physical beauty of the characters, the sets and the songs. If everyone looked and dressed like them (I guess though that everyone will have to eat like them,) la vida es un sueno. Catherine Deneuve, like a flower, is blossoming into the beauty that she is. Anne Vernon,a mother is as chic and graceful as no mother can be. Marc Michel and Nino Castelnuovo are dreams. There is no Cantinflas in this movie.
There are musical scenes of particular beauty where you feel the music, the singing and the characters as they act it out, to be so good, that it touches you in the deepest part of your mind and emotions. The scene in the jewelry shop, which starts with "What beautiful things..." as jewels in a box are shown and in comes the most beautiful jewels, Catherine and Anne. The poignant scene of departure which has become a hit song, translated as "If it takes forever, I will wait for you." And a softly shimmering song where the jeweler sings of a prior love named Lola, "Autrefois..."
The movie is a beautiful gem that will fascinate and satisfy you in all its color,music and the physical beauty of the characters. I only wish I was in that movie and looked like any of them. Unfortunately, I am real life, but then, that's why we go to movies.
I will wait for you... November 21, 2009
Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A quick bit of personal history: I first saw this in May 1996 theatrically, in a newly-restored print. It was about a month after breaking up a 6-year relationship which I didn't want to end, though I should have. She was probably the least-romantic person I've ever met - not that she didn't have "romantic" notions in the larger sense, nearly everyone does, but the romantic part of relationships she didn't get. Or her idea of romance was just so remote and unexplainable that I could never figure it out, and she could never have told me. Why it took us 6 years to know for sure that we weren't meant for each other, I'll never know.
She probably hated this film.
I, on the other hand, am as enraptured by it now as I was on that first viewing 13 years ago and the couple of times in between. From the first shot of the harbour of Cherbourg panning gracefully down to an overhead shot of candy-colored umbrellas in the rain, to the final mirroring shot of an equally artificial-looking Esso station in the snow five years later, it's pure sentimental, stylized magic.
Some have mentioned that there isn't much in the way of character development in this admittedly very simple story of young lovers parted by war and ultimately finding new relationships and lives apart from each other - but I think they're missing the point. It's not supposed to be terribly real, or rather it is suffused throughout with a sense of heightened reality, exemplified most obviously in the entirely sung dialog and in the brightness of the color scheme, but also in the intensity of emotions that could, after all, be experienced by any of us. It doesn't matter that I don't really "know" Geneviève or Guy - they are any young lovers and what the film is about, it seems to me, is that bittersweet feeling we all have towards our first loves. At the end of the film, both are married and it is fairly clear that they have made the right choices - one thing I find fascinating is that the two leads are both rather weak and passive, and in both cases they end up with stronger, more aggressive and more competent partners. Had they ended up with each other, what kind of future would they have had?
The music - well, you can't take the music out, or it does, in fact, show its thinnness. Here's a great quote from Jonathan Rosenbaum's long review regarding composer Michel Legrand's contribution to the film:
"Though Legrand isn't credited as the film's cowriter, his collaboration with Demy, who wrote the lyrics, suggests that he may well deserve to be, for this is a film in which the score and the narrative are inseparable, shaped to the same architecture. Demy once noted that Umbrellas should be described as a film "in song" the way that some films are 'in color'."
If one can't get past the notion that this is, in fact, a romantic fantasy amped up to the nth degree through color, through its plot absurdities (one night of passion resulting in Geneviève having to marry the diamond merchant, Guy's beloved godmother dying on the same day he learns of Geneviève's marriage and quits his job, etc) and most of all through the hyper-romantic music which runs the gamut from jazz to chanson, then there's not much I can say. You have to fall under the spell and take it as it is, not ask for what it doesn't provide - asking for more realism in the relationships seems to me to be missing the point.
For me the only real flaw in the film at all is Deneuve - not at all bad, but at 21 she really is a little too old for the naivete of Geneviève; this though is a very minor point in a film that I can never grow tired of. I like Demy's next musical, THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, possibly even more -- and I'd suggest all who love this to make that a priority. All who hated this of course should avoid it like the plague, unless they can find a way to put themselves under the spell that they somehow missed in watching this sublime confection...
Showing reviews 1-5 of 121
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