THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (76) (second viewing: 85)

Directed by: Jacques Demy (1967)

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Francoise Dorleac, George Chakiris, Gene Kelly, Danielle Darrieux

The Pitch: A dozen characters drift in and out of each other's lives during a carnival weekend in a French provincial town.

Theo Sez: Not the sombre masterwork UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is (quelle surprise), nor in fact a follow-up as such - except in its fragile charm and its faith in artifice even, and especially, side by side with the quotidian (even as the characters are singing and dancing we often see people walking by at the edges of the frame, going about their business). Formally it's less rigorous than CHERBOURG, though also more exciting - a conventional musical, songs separated by bits of dialogue, except that characters might sing only a few bars instead of a whole song, or might speak in rhyme instead of actually singing ; the effect is to make music seem ubiquitous, second nature to the characters (each of whom has their own "personal" song, which they reprise at intervals) and to the film. Its jollity - substituting a trio of deliriously happy endings for CHERBOURG's bittersweet finale - may make it seem a little precious, but in fact its buoyant, lighter-than-air quality carries with it constantly the possibility of a fall : it's the ultimate missed-connections movie, people almost meeting their soulmate yet not quite, missing eternal happiness by a few seconds. That everything comes out right in the end seems treasurable, joyous - a miracle ; that we knew it would all along - that we can share in the film's blissfully sunny, totally irrational optimism - seems even more so. [Second viewing, 8 years later; higher rating is actually an average - first half 95, second 75. Loses impetus, and the tunes become less memorable, but the first hour is as close as anyone's got to the 'total musical', a world where everything is musicalized and singing and dancing become as natural as breathing. (My favourite may be the moment when the woman behind the counter casually asks "So what do you do?" and the carnival guys just as casually say "Who, us?", look at each other and suddenly launch into "Nous voyageons..".) A near-masterpiece, and even the second hour has cherishable moments like Darrieux sighing that the family dinner "has become a little dull" - which it has, but only if you ignore the fact that every line, however banal, has been spoken in rhyme.]