Director: Jacques Demy
I hate musicals. And The Umbrellas of Cherbourg begins with a scene where an auto mechanic is singing to his auto mechanic friends about what they're going to be doing that night - one said, 'going out with a girl', which seemed to me to be a pretty bald-faced lie, given the singing and the general Frenchness of the whole thing. Anyway, getting past the notion that this entire movie is sung aloud took some doing, but it definitely beats the normal convention of musicals where people stand around talking normally and then spontaneously burst into song.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg excels for two reasons. One is in making a rather simple love story interesting and emotionally resonant by way of musical expression. The second reason is its camera work - I think of musicals as these very staid affairs where people face the camera and the entire thing is staged like a play put on film. Not so in this movie - the characters and the camera are always moving. The director knows that song alone isn't enough to carry it.
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