Friday, February 1, 2019
591 - The Young Girls of Rochefort, France, 1968. Dir. Jacques Demy.
Every frame a Dufy.
Will the right people ever find each other?
Yvonne and Delphine and Solange and Simon and Maxence and Andy are all looking for their ideal love.
And over the course of the story the viewer sees who should go with whom. But they keep missing each other.
Sometimes by a few minutes. Sometimes by a few meters.
If only they could adjust their timing.
Yvonne Garnier runs the cafe. She has two young-adult daughters, Delphine and Solange. Delphine is a dancer, and Solange is a singer. Though they are both both. Delphine teaches girls ballet, and Solange teaches music and vocal.
Delphine and Solange have a song they sing about being sisters. Think about the Irving Berlin song "Sisters," sung by Rosemary Clooney and Rosemary Clooney in the 1954 Michael Curtiz film White Christmas. Delphine and Solange have their own sister song, which is witty and playful.
All three ladies long for true love. What they call their ideal.
Etienne and Bill are carnies come to town to set up the fair. Perhaps they will be Delphine's and Solange's ideals.
Or perhaps they are merely players passing through.
Yvonne also has a 10-year old son Booboo. Delphine is supposed to pick him up from school, but the carnies offer to get him on behalf of Yvonne.
Delphine has been seeing a man named Guillaume Lancien. He owns an art gallery she likes to frequent. But he is not her ideal love.
He has recently hung a drawing on the wall that looks just like her. She is amazed by the similarity.
Maxence is a sailor stationed in Rochefort. In his heart he is a painter and poet. And he is searching for his ideal love. He has painted what she will look like from his own imagination.
Simon Dame owns a music store in town. His misses is ex-wife, who left him ten years ago, telling him she was going with a man to Mexico, with children she had from a previous marriage, and pregnant with Simon's child.
She found his name to be unfortunate. And comical. Monsieur Dame. Making her Madame Dame.
Andy is a musician and dancer who went to conservatory with Simon and has now become widely successful. He comes to Rochefort to visit.
We are watching Jacques Demy's next film after The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and it is another richly colorful singing and dancing event.
It is not the same kind of musical as Umbrellas, where all of the dialogue is sung. This is a more typical musical, with spoken dialogue interspersed with sung songs.
We open on the wharf. In vibrant colors. The dockworkers are working.
And a song and dance routine breaks out.
With movements similar to the dance routine in Michael Jackson's Beat It video. It feels as he may have been influenced by this film.
The song-and-dance numbers are alive and joyful.
And the casting is rich with surprises.
We know who the perky blonde, Catherine Deneuve, is. But who is that actress playing her red-headed sister Solange?
And who is that playing Etienne?
And forty-five minutes into the picture, look who is playing Andy.
Talk about an American in Paris!
This film is a visual and aural feast.
And maybe, just maybe, everyone can find his ideal.
* * * *
GEORGE CHAKRIS began as a singer or dancer in the chorus of several Hollywood musicals, including Song of Love (1947), The Great Caruso (1951), Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Brigadoon (1954), White Christmas (1954), and There's No Business Like Show Business (1954).
Then he achieved stardom as Bernardo the head of the Sharks in West Side Story (1961).
Now he is Etienne, one of the carnies.
GROVER DALE also played in West Side Story, but in 1957 on Broadway. He was a Jet. Snowboy. Dale did most of his work in the theater. He was a stage man.
Now he is Bill, the other carny.
FRANCOISE DORLEAC was the first of two sisters to gain fame. Think of Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine. Two sisters who each achieved acclaim. Fontaine lived to be 96. De Havilland is alive today, at 102. Dorleac's sister was none other than Catherine Deneuve herself. Sisters playing sisters. Catherine Deneuve is alive today. And still working. She has three films scheduled to come out in 2019. However, Dorleac died in a car crash when she was only 25 years old. Yet in those 25 years she was able to make 17 movies. We have seen one of them already: Francois Truffaut's The Soft Skin (1964). We will be seeing her in Roman Polanski's Cul-de-Sac (1966) soon. She also starred in Roger Vadim's version of La Ronde (1964), from Arthur Schnitzler's 1900 play. We have seen Max Ophuls' 1950 film version of the play.
The Soft Skin (1964)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/05/123-soft-skin-1964-france-dir-francois.html
La Ronde (1950)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/04/091-la-ronde-1950-france-dir-max-ophuls.html
MICHEL PICCOLI plays Simon Dame. We know him as Paul Javal, the leading man, a film director, in Contempt (1963).
French Cancan (1955)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/03/066-french-cancan-1955-france-dir-jean.html
Le Doulos (1963)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/03/086-le-doulos-hat-1963-france-dir-jean.html
Contempt (1963)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/04/111-contempt-1963-franceitaly-dir-jean.html
Heartbeat (La Chamade) (1968)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2018/03/426-heartbeat-la-chamade-france-1968.html
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
https://realbillbillions.blogspot.com/2017/05/145-that-obscure-object-of-desire-1977.html
We already know and love CATHERINE DENEUVE. By now we have seen her quite a few times.
And then there is Andy Miller, played by the American in Paris himself. It is most satisfying to see him appear on screen without knowing he is coming.
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