Contact Admin. From a stateside perspective, its launch in the U. Young Girls is, of course, a French musical, not simply an effort to duplicate a Hollywood one. It was shot on location in Rochefort, is intricately and beautifully scored by Michel Legrand with lyrics by Demy , and features many of the key players in French cinema at the time: Yet the fact that the cast also includes Gene Kelly as Andy, a Paris-based composer and George Chakiris and Grover Dale as workers in a traveling motor show whose weekend in Rochefort frames the action , and that the movie unabashedly cites and evokes American jazz, On the Town, An American in Paris, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and West Side Story, apparently threw Kael off the track.
But she must have found some of the stylistic collisions in this case harder to swallow. And it may be equally disconcerting that this large-scale, essentially tragic musical concludes with a plethora of happy endings, or at least with the ironic and improbable promise of same, some of them destined to occur offscreen.
For the vexing yet unmistakable triumph of this movie is that it somehow manages to be both more artificial and more realistic than we expect our musicals to be.
Indeed, this is fundamental to what makes it quintessentially French. And in Umbrellas, he was also keying those rituals to the conventions of continuous songβnot precisely those associated with American song- and-dance musicals but closer to those of Continental operettas. Here he combines this observation with dance and song as well as Hollywood-musical inflections to show some undercurrents of what the characters are feeling, remembering, and dreaming, often all three at once.
And part of its peculiarity to American taste suggests a certain philosophical conundrum: Originally, Demy wanted to extend his cross-references further by casting Nino Castelnuovo, the hero of Umbrellas, in the Grover Dale part, but the actor proved to be unavailable.
