The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) is film where score and color drives this story of how we choose our paths in life.

The opening iris shot onto a painting-like setting prepares us for the visual artistry of the film. The magic-hour quality of this shot also alludes to romance with the few clouds reflected in the mirror-still waters forboding trouble within the romance. The boats along the wharf hint that separation will somehow play a role, and the crane shot tilting down to frame a couple (sailor and significant other hugging, seemingly prior to the man setting sail) confirms the separation motiff. On the wharf, a person in yellow walks their bike along a yellow line suggesting a perceived path in life. The rain and melancholic score suggests this path in life in not always an easy thing to determine.

Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) is figuratively the person in yellow, and it is his path that we follow throughout the movie. When Guy first leaves the garage where he works, he leaves on a yellow bike. As the film progresses, we connect other events in Guy's life with the color yellow. For example: Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) wraps a yellow sweater around herself when she goes to meet Guy outside the umbrella shop presenting herself as a pretty present for Guy; later, when Guy and Genevieve walk along the dock, they walk behind a flashing yellow traffic light both indicating proceed with caution and foreshadowing the dead end to their relationship; when Guy looks at Genevieve, he glances at the yellow bow in her hair, suggesting the prize he has his eyes on; when they walk in front of a boat, a line across its hull points the other way, suggesting his life's path does not lie with Genevieve.

Towards the end of the opening shot, two men travelling along the same line, but in opposite directions, are presented three times. The first time, the two men walk their bicycles. The third time, the men (a sailor and man in yellow) bump against each other, but not so significantly that it changes their course of direction. These encounters presage the later encounters of Guy and Roland (Marc Michel). How each of these three encounters relate to the story are discussed below.

In the first encounter, the two men are dressed similarly and are separated by some small distance as they pass each other. When Guy and Roland first encounter each other in the film, it is at the garage Guy works. Roland (in black) drives in his (black) Mercedes and stands by his car, as Guy (in blue) remains a few car lengths away. The only interaction between them is through Guy's boss, maintaining the concept of distance between them. In addition, Guy turns down the request to work on Roland's car because of his date with Genevieve. The two men are on opposite paths. Guy has love on his mind. Roland, we find out later, is there on business.

In the second encounter, one of the two men is dressed as a sailor while the other is in a yellow raincoat. The sailor represents Roland, a man of the world, a traveler, at home in Paris or London. The man in yellow is Guy. This second encounter on the wharf is mirrored later in the film when Roland, after dropping off a check with Genevieve's mother, Mme. Emery (Anne Vernon), drives in front of Genevieve on his way to Paris. This places Roland in between Genevieve and Guy, as she is about to cross the street to visit with Guy. Both men are still traveling in opposite directions.

In the third encounter in the opening scene, the sailor and the man in yellow bump against each other. It is at this instant that their individual universes momentarily intersect. Their point of intersection is, of course, Genevieve.

Within the body of the film, this intersection occurs when Genevieve is writing Roland a letter thanking him for his postcard. Roland's postcard sits next to several items (one, a bottle, has what looks like vines on it, either representing time elapsed (and therefore her memories of Guy fading) or Roland insinuating himself into Genevieve's life and thereby weakening the bond between her and Guy; or both) in the identical blue of Guy's room. Genevieve's picking up Roland's postcard (removing it from Guy's sphere of influence (represented by the blue bottle) and bringing it front and center closer to her, in between herself and Guy) is the exact moment she transfers her allegience from Guy to Roland and is the literal bump between the two men in the opening scene. The following medium shot of Genevieve holding Roland's postcard excludes any mise-en-scene reference to Guy.

That Demy wants us to see this moment as a transfer of Genevieve's allegiance from one man to the other is made obvious by the change in mise-en-scene. In the shot preceeding the transfer, the items on Genevieve's table are a lighter blue that matches the vertical stripes of the wallpaper in her room. The items shown in the subsequent shot where the transfer takes place are a different blue (a different bottle all together); a blue that matches the blue in Guy's room.

Demy has primed us for this transfer in the previous scene by showing Genevieve in the yellow sweater seen earlier when with Guy, and a same-yellow painted truck visible outside a window (reflecting the physical distance between Guy and Genevieve) over her right shoulder. Significantly, Genevieve's sweater only covers her shoulders indicating her tenuous memories of Guy. A last bit of cinematography is when Genevieve turns her back to the window (yellow truck - not a good sign for Guy) and the camera tracks left framing Mme. Emery in between the yellow truck outside the window and Geneviev's yellow sweater. This final framing represents Mme. Emery's scissoring the remaining ties between her daughter and Guy behind Genevieve's back.

In the end though, it is Genevieve who chooses (financial) protection represented by Roland over the ideal of love represented by Guy. If the film were about Genevieve, Demy would have ended the film after her marriage to Roland. Instead he shows us the devastating effect Genevieve's abandonment has on Guy, and Guy's subsequent decision to move on in life precipiated by his Tante Elise's (Mireille Perry) death.

In the scene after her death, Madeleine (Ellen Farner) confronts Guy with who he has become, a bitter and lonely person. Faced with this realization, Guy asks Madeleine to stay. She does and eventually, Guy discovers Madeleine is the one he wants to share his life with.

Ironically, Guy accomplishes everything he set out to do: first to find someone who would wait for him (Madeleine does just that) and share a life (same path) chosen by both (Madeleine again); and second to open up his own garage. It is this happiness (scene where he leaves the notary's office and meets Madeleine (in orange) at a cafe is sun-splashed; the only outright sunny scene in the film) that is threatened by the arrival of Genevieve at his garage at the end of film.

At the end of the film, in the garage scene, we see Genevieve settled into a life so emotionally cold even her fur coat can't keep her warm. She's turned into her mother, having traded protection for true love. More than that she has discovered Roland is the collector of jewels Demy made us privy to earlier in the film (in the scene where Genevieve and her mother visit the jeweler and Roland offers to buy the mother's pearls, Genevieve is seated in white (representing the pearl Roland is really investing in) in the background. Roland is standing in the foreground (superior position); allowing him to view the real object of his desire: Genevieve). Genevieve notes how much warmer it is inside, referring to the emotional warmth evident in Guy's garage. She lies (looks down and away) when she tells him that their meeting is a chance encounter. And when she positions herself next to the Christmas tree, she's doing what now comes naturally to her: thinking of herself as an object of beauty and offering herself up as a present to Guy. When Guy declines to meet his daughter, he reaffrims his path in life, and lets Genevieve know she should leave. The extreme long shot of Genevieve walking out to her Mercedes drips (almost) of the emotionally frigid life she has found her path in life to be.

It's interesting to note that in the earlier scene at the garage, Guy's son dresses in a yellow slicker and his daughter has a bow in her hair, duplicating their parents figuratively at an earlier age. We are left to imagine them at some future date deciding their own paths in life, just as their parents had done.

Towards the end of the opening scene, a few light colored umbrellas wait for the orange umbrella'd woman (Madeleine) with her baby carriage representing the start of a new journey (in this case, Francoise's) to pass. At the close of the film, Demy would have us believe Guy and Madeleine will point Francoise in the right (love) direction as he starts his journey. The picture of Francoise (the daughter) affected by wealth (she sounds the Mercedes' horn so they can be waited on - as her mother must do) when at the pump, forces us to consider that Francoise is doomed to follow in Genevieve's footsteps.

The melancholic score at the end reminds us that whatever path the children choose, determining that path will be no easier for them then it was for their parents.