Love, as people collectively understand it, has always been influenced by its representations in cinema. It’s why many people, myself included, will use the phrases like, “I feel like I’m in a movie,” or, “this would never happen to [insert favorite romantic character],” while navigating the plethora of ups and downs throughout our romantic lives. Now, cinema’s influence over our conceptions of romance is neither inherently good nor bad; however, it often sets us with very rigid, idyllic ideas surrounding love that can often lead toward romantic failure. That’s why, upon my first watch of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) in an undergraduate genre class on the musical, I instantly gravitated towards the honest portrayal of love. Demy, pulling from the iconography and style of the Hollywood musical, showed me a new way to conceptualize romance, heartbreak, and personal growth.
Set in Demi’s candy-colored vision of late-1950s wartime France, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg follows young lovers Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a mechanic who has yet to be conscripted to France’s Algerian war efforts, and Genvieve (Catherine Deneuve), a woman who works at her mother’s umbrella store, as they navigate the complexities of young love. However, their passionate relationship is brought to an abrupt halt when Guy is conscripted to the Algerian war effort. Pregnant with Guy’s child, Genvieve is left in Cherbourg to pick up the pieces of her shattered heart and attempt to move on in his absence.
Before diving into the complicated romance between Guy and Genvieve, it is important to first understand the generic conventions of love in the Hollywood musical. During the early 1960s, the Hollywood musical was considered an artifact of the past. The genre, which peaked in popularity in the 1930s with the advent of sound in cinema and maintained commercial viability through the 1940s, suffered from its ideological baggage. Fabricated idealism, ceaseless optimism, and blatant artifice all marked the genre as nothing more than high-spirited entertainment with little-to-no critical value. Although these critiques are applicable to every aspect of the Hollywood musical, they are most noticeable in its portrayal of heterosexual romance. In these films, romantic relationships between men and women are idyllic. The couples are always full of passion and youthful moxie, never quarreling and always singing away the troubles that surround them. If the couple is ever separate, everything in the film works together to lead them back together; an artificial happily ever after to complete the film on an uplifting note.
Demy, recognizing these and many other shortcomings of the musical, decided to use its tropes to interrogate realistic relationships and the very real pains of failed love conventionally ignored by the Hollywood dream factory. In Umbrellas, the director uses the bright Technicolor style and sung-through musical form to portray Guy and Genvieve’s romance. However, where the conventional musical uses these emotional and visual exaggerations to displace the story from reality, Demy uses these generic signifiers to have his audience buy into the challenging realities of love and loss. In his essay “A Finite Forever,” Jim Ridley describes Demy’s ability to present an “exaltation of life’s bittersweet balances and trade-offs — of unexpected triumphs made richer by the dashed hopes that offset them.” In Umbrellas, love is not idyllic but instead a demanding ordeal necessary to the personal growth of its characters.
From the beginning of the film, Demy makes no effort to obscure the realities of the relationship that he is about to explore. The film opens with Michael Legrand’s melancholic overture “Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi” playing over the film’s credits as well as the intertitle for the first section, “The Departure.” The film’s romantic resistance against Hollywood idealism begins here, with Demy articulating the fleeting, temporary nature of the relationship before introducing the doe-eyed lovers. In this simple intertitle, Demy acknowledges his distaste for the romantic ideology of the Hollywood musical and assures the audience that this musical will be different; in this film, the central love cannot last forever.
In this first section, Guy and Genvieve’s love flourishes amongst the neon yellows, fiery oranges, and deep reds that accent their dates throughout Cherbourg. We aren’t aware of the origins of their love, but the overwhelming brightness of the town’s colors invites the audience to revel in the youthful passion shared between Guy and Genvieve. The couple’s love for each other intensifies with every meeting, and they eventually dream of their future together while walking home from a night of dancing. During their conversation, the first inklings of trouble seep into the relationship, as Genvieve reveals her family’s financial trouble and mother’s disapproval of their relationship while Guy acknowledges his upcoming conscription into the Algerian war effort. Demy breaks the genre’s artifice of romantic idealism, cutting the lovers down from their temporary fantasy and bringing them back into the unforgiving harshness of reality.
When Guy inevitably receives his conscription notice, the two spend the night the only way possible under the threat of separation — they vow their undying love for one another and experience their first and last taste of each other’s physical love. As they head towards Guy’s apartment, the two seemingly levitate along the sidewalk, staying perfectly still in their embrace. In their final moments together, the lovers recognize the impossibility of their relationship, and as the present steadily moves into the future, they choose to remain inactive in the process, performing their final resistance through inaction before their untimely separation.
In the second section, “The Absence,” Genvieve is left to navigate the fallout of her first major relationship. Pregnant with Guy’s child, the reality of her financial and marital situation gnaw at her being. In this section, Demy strips away the romantic idealism from the musical and investigates the heart-rending emotions of love lost. Instead of working to reunify the lost romance, Umbrellas pushes the two former lovers farther apart and forces them to move past the romantic delirium of first love. As Genevieve becomes more worried about her social status as a single unwed mother, Guy’s letters home become less and less frequent, and her family’s financial situation becomes more desperate. In a cry of helplessness, Genevieve tells her mother, “I would have died for him. So why aren’t I dead?” Her mother replies with Demy’s ultimate thesis for the film, stating that,“people only die of love in the movies.” The failure of a relationship does not mean the death of the self, even though it can feel like it at the time. In his ultimate resistance against the romantic conventions of the Hollywood musical, Demy asserts that romantic failure is not a form of death, but is instead a bittersweet doorway that leads us into the rest of our romantic lives with a new sense of ourselves.
With the realities of her situation becoming more desperate, Genvieve begins to fully understand the impossibility of the type of love she shared with Guy. Learning from her failed relationship, Genvieve’s romantic priorities shift and she now seeks a relationship that can provide her with security and fulfillment. At her mother’s request, Genvieve begins dating Roland (Marc Michel), an affluent jewelry salesman. Although this new relationship lacks the blind passion of her previous relationship, Genvieve has romantically matured, and achieves the support she needs with Roland to be able to live a comfortable life.
In the final section, “The Return,” this process of emotional healing is mirrored with Guy. Upon his return from the war, Guy seeks out Genvieve to find that she has left Cherbourg after her marriage to Roland. Disillusioned, Guy wanders a pale, colourless Cherbourg contemplating his heartache, stopping for a drink at a seedy bar and spending the night with a sex worker (also named Genvieve) to try to mend his broken heart. Wallowing away, Guy experiences the pain that Hollywood tries to obscure, experiencing a fate that momentarily feels worse than death. However, love is not a battle where the victors survive and the losers are left to die of their wounds, and Guy begins to make the same romantic transition into maturity that Genvieve experienced. As Guy’s heartache dulls, his romantic salvation comes in the form of his childhood friend Madeleine (Ellen Farner), leading Guy towards a successful path of romantic redemption.
In the final coda of the film, set four years past the start of the film, Guy and Madeline have started a family and run a small Esso station, a dream Guy has had since he was a child. In his relationship with Madeline, Guy has been able to achieve success and security that would have been unlikely if he had been able to stay with Genvieve. As Madeline and their son leave for the shops, Genvieve and her daughter pull into the station for gas, not realizing that Guy is the owner. As she comes into the station from the cold, she sees Guy, and the two experience the reunification that Hollywood would conventionally capitalize on. However, upon their meeting, the two are older, wiser, and now understand the reality of the forever that they once promised each other. In an exchange that pierces the coldest of hearts, Genvieve asks whether Guy would like to meet their child. Understanding the finality of their relationship, Guy declines and wishes Genevieve well with her family on her way out. Getting back into her car, Genvieve looks back for the last time at what could have been and drives away, achieving long overdue closure for the relationship that first introduced her to the complicated cycle of love and loss.
In an essay from his 2017 collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, culture critic Hanif Abdurraqib writes “one of the worst things [art does] is compare love to war. We do this in times of actual war without a thought about what it actually means. Mothers bury their children while a[n artist] calls a bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle—as if there is a graveyard for heartbreak alone.” Throughout Umbrellas, Demy explicates this same sentiment, forcing his audience to disengage from the Hollywood idealism and realize the valuable lived experience that comes from our tastes of overwhelming heartache. In an ending that has been called both the happiest sad ending and the saddest happy ending, Demy resists the Hollywood dichotomy of ultimate romantic victory or death through failure, instead celebrating the challenging complexities of love and romantic maturity that can only develop at the hands of heartbreak.
