LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jacques Demy: Les Parapluies De Cherbourg
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It's tempting in the brazen, iridescent light of Baz Luhrmann's all-singing, all-dancing Moulin Rouge (2001) to declare Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg as some kind of influential predecessor, a similarly song-saturated 'grand-popera'. Or, perhaps more predictably, Demy's 'nouvelle vague' masterpiece could be celebrated as a knowingly cross-Atlantic transposition of the best of the Freed-Unit Hollywood musicals, grafted onto a touchingly bitter-sweet Gallic romance: Minnelli and Donen-Kelly harmonizing with the poignant circularity of that most truly 'musical' of cine-auteurs, Max Ophüls. But such claims don't really capture this singular film's formal design or its ultimately un-romantic sadness.
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If nothing else, Demoiselles has abandoned itself to love and chance, casting aside the restraint that characterizes the form and color of Demy's previous Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, a strangely gloomy film marked more than anything else by ugly purple wallpaper. Shot in primary colors which contrast with dominant whites (not unlike Godard's Le M*epris), Demoiselles is less a synthetic than Cherbourg because of its reliance on apparently natural light sources and location sets. A ubiquitous sunlight links the interiors to the outdoor shots much better than Demy's style is able to do and, as in his Lola and Baie des Anges, shines brightly through the entire film. Demy's style is a strange hybrid. The superb interiors owe much to Godard (Une Femme Est Une Femme, Le Mepris, Pierrot le Fou) and succeed in filling the cinemascope screen with inventive precision; on the other hand, the exteriors are derivative of American films (with shots lifted from Stanley Donen's Singing In The Rain and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl) and don't always work. Demy's Ray like tendency to pull into high angle results too often in his simply being stranded up there without a satisfactory shot to cut to.
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Two subsequent Demy films relate closely to Lola. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Roland, Lola's rejected lover, recounts his brief liaison with Lola to the visual accompaniment of a flashback to the arcade that was one of their meeting-places. In addition, Lola herself reappears in The Model Shop. Two other films are bound in to the series as well. Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is linked by means of a certain cheating on the part of Demy—Lola has been found murdered and dismembered in a laundry basket, but the corpse is a different Lola. Especially poignant, as the series continues, is the treatment of the abrupt, unpredictable, seemingly fortuitous happy ending.
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Demy passte nie so recht in die Schubladen der Kritik: Er war vieles gleichzeitig und verstand es, diesen Umstand in vollkommene Filmformen zu gießen. Demy war ein experimentierfreudiger Populist, ein verschmitzter Revolutionär, Querdenker, Utopist. Er drehte Singspiele und Musicals über proletarische und kleinbürgerliche Lebenswelten - Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), Une chambre en ville (1982) - und fröhlich perverse, poppige, manchmal sehr erwachsene Kunstmärchen (Peau d’âne, 1970; The Pied Piper, 1972).
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Les Parapluies De Cherbourg