THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (93)

Directed by: Jacques Demy (1964)

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon

The Pitch: Young lovers are parted by war ; she gives birth to his child but, thinking he no longer cares, marries another man. A story told entirely in song.

Theo Sez: Hard to talk about this rationally : obviously not for everyone (simple, if not quite conclusive, test : did you love or hate EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU?), but - for this viewer - an overwhelming experience, delicately magical and astonishingly pure (not to say embarrassingly tear-sodden). What's most remarkable is that this famously "romantic", allegedly "sweet" love story, with its lush music and pastel pinks and blues (turning to purples and dark greens for the final act), can be such a sad movie, a sombre lament for the transience of feelings : "I feel him slipping away from me," sobs our heroine after only a couple of months without her man ; "When I think of him, I see only his photograph." It's the film's great, heartbreaking truth that love is finally irrelevant, that people end up with - and are happy with - other people out of convenience, or circumstance, or just blind chance. The ending - the lovers' brief meeting, years later - could've been a kind of CASABLANCA moment, old feelings rekindled with a flash of eyes and a burst of Max Steiner strings, but it's far more than that - maybe because it's less than that : the old sweethearts are subdued, older and wiser, barely exchanging more than small talk. It's like they don't even remember their youthful passion - but we remember and, magnificently, the music remembers, soaring round these two weary, faded souls like the keening of their lost love, still crying plaintively from beyond their cocoon of marriage and parenthood. It's extraordinary - not least because the film's operatic form, every line sung, depends on music and characters going hand in hand, reflecting each other : it's as if the film has turned against itself, Demy refusing to follow his characters into the harshness of the real world, insisting on the sweet memory of young lovers vowing eternal devotion amid pretty pastel settings. There's nothing fey or sickly about true romanticism : it's about the impossibility of love, and it's infinitely sad. Dreamy, melancholy, unforgettable.