Part of Music City Mondays and Restoration Roundup and Holiday Classics
Mon, Dec 16 at 7:00pm: Introduction from Julia Sutherland, executive director of the Village at Glencliff and former cofounder/managing director of Belcourt YES!, the community group that saved the Belcourt from closing in 2000 | BUY TICKETS
The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.
“If four stars, in the Scene‘s Movie Guide, denotes a must-see movie, Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical deserves five. It’s one of my absolute favorite films. Girl (Catherine Deneuve) loves boy (Nino Castelnuovo) in a seaside French town splashed with impossibly gorgeous Technicolor. Girl and boy swear eternal love, until the boy is shipped off to the conflict in Algiers. Then the girl learns she is pregnant. With every line sung to a lilting Michel Legrand score—the main theme, Americanized as “I Will Wait for You,” became a pop standard—it strikes some people at first as the silliest thing they’ve ever seen. But few movies evoke the transience and naïveté of first love as piercingly as its youthful intensity. It culminates in a glorious final image, a gas station dusted by a Christmas Eve snowfall, that may be the saddest happy ending in movie history. Get a stout box of Kleenexes, take someone you love and don’t let go of their hand.” —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (May 6, 2004)
Restored in 4K in 2024 by Ciné-Tamaris at Éclair Classics and L.E. Diapason laboratories, from the wet scan of the original camera negative and the three-track stereo mix of music and voices. Restoration supervised by Mathieu Remy and Rosalie Varda-Demy.
“It continues to charm and delight for the same reasons it did back in 1964.” —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times “One of the most romantic films ever made.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times “A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history.” —Hal Hinson, Washington Post
