Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Cinematographically, I thought this film was fantastic. The use of bold, bright colors worked well to create a visually and aesthetically stimulating and engaging experience, while also emulating, in a sense, the relentless but beautiful soundtrack—both of which, that is, the vivid colors and the music, serve as the backdrop and the foundation (especially, of course, the music) for the entire story. It was daunting at first to hear that not one word of dialogue is spoken throughout the entire film, but rather every line is sung—it seemed that it would more distracting and frustrating than anything else, and to be honest, at times I found myself wishing for some spoken dialogue, for some break in the unrelenting unreality created by the constant singing. However, I did not find it to be distracting or even that frustrating, but rather interesting and even sort of charming. Unlike a typical musical, which has musical and often choreographed and autonomous sequences arising out of scenes which occur within ‘reality’ –that is, a musical scene of a sort of unrealistic nature arises out of a scene of a sort of realistic nature, with spoken dialogue, etc. – this film is elevated in its entirety to this position of strange non-reality, though from scene to scene, if the volume were down, it would be quite hard to pick up on because the characters flow through the story as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.

The story itself was endearing but very undemanding; had it not been for the soundtrack and the singing, I feel I may have lost interest. It is truly the experimental aspect of the soundtrack and the overall creation of a musical that is, at least relative to my experience with musicals, incongruous with certain conventions, that makes this film interesting from a critical point of view. Making beautiful the every-day, spoken, conversational word through singing, as I have stated, elevates the film to a certain idealistic non-reality. When posing this idea with the thematic content of the film, love or love not decayed but lost (as I have interpreted it), a certain anti-idealistic statement seems to be made about the nature of love and human relationships, for though the love between Genevieve and Guy has not decayed it is nonetheless lost, and they are left separated and searching, and even finding, love in someone else.