How Jacques Demy reimag­ined the Hol­ly­wood musical

Few French films of the 1960s match the sheer visu­al audac­i­ty, humane spec­ta­cle and radi­ant colours of Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. Mix­ing Hol­ly­wood Tech­ni­col­or splen­dour with a dis­tinct­ly fairy tale vision of post­war France, Demy achieves in his cho­sen form of the musi­cal what many of his New Wave con­tem­po­raries achieved in their own respec­tive recla­ma­tion of Amer­i­can gen­res, and cer­tain­ly with the same high standard.

The young girls in ques­tion are sis­ters Del­phine (Cather­ine Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dor­leac), a bal­let instruc­tor and musi­cian in the provin­cial town of Rochefort look­ing for love and escape. A fes­ti­val is tak­ing place in the town over the week­end and soon a vari­ety of char­ac­ters are per­form­ing their own com­e­dy of errors, danc­ing grad­u­al­ly towards each of their nat­ur­al desired loves.

Demy’s film is as much a vehi­cle for the real life sis­ter­ly pair­ing of Deneuve and Dor­leac as much as any­thing else. Their on-screen rela­tion­ship is oth­er­world­ly, at times bare­ly act­ing as they shoot each oth­er glances of affec­tion and joy at the sheer fun they’re hav­ing with the roles. This is even con­sid­er­ing how Deneuve was far less versed in phys­i­cal per­for­mances, hav­ing to go the extra mile with the dance rou­tines in par­tic­u­lar to get up to scratch with her already trained sis­ter. With this being Dorleac’s penul­ti­mate film before her trag­ic death in a car crash the year of the film’s release, how­ev­er, a sense of melan­choly is present in hind­sight. At least Demy cap­tured this chem­istry for posterity.

It’s impos­si­ble not to appre­ci­ate the dis­tinct­ly French aug­men­ta­tion that Demy quite nat­u­ral­ly per­forms in his film. As typ­i­cal for the direc­tor, he con­scious­ly takes the very basics from Hol­ly­wood musi­cals but always retains a dis­tinct­ly unusu­al French flavour. Bal­anc­ing along­side the pres­ence of Gene Kel­ly and obvi­ous nods to Stan­ley Donan musi­cals, for exam­ple, is a sub-nar­ra­tive regard­ing a sor­did and grue­some mur­der. The visu­al world is also lit­tered with dis­tinct­ly late ​’60s images of logos and con­sumerism adja­cent to provin­cial archi­tec­ture. It’s an unusu­al mix and yet the brava­do of the whole film allows it all to work.

Michel Legrand’s music ties all of Demy’s lav­ish, dreamy visu­als togeth­er and is arguably the strongest ele­ment of the film. Aside from the now-famous songs (is there an instance of any French sis­ters not attempt­ing at some point to sing ​‘Chan­son des Jumelles?’), Legrand’s motifs lit­ter the film in casu­al as well as overt moments, por­tray­ing the era’s pen­chant for cool lounge and soft jazz as much as big, show-stop­ping num­bers. It’s one of Legrand’s high­lights and that’s say­ing some­thing con­sid­er­ing his long and esteemed career.

In the end, Demy cre­ates some­thing tru­ly orig­i­nal. Rather like with Jean-Luc Godard and François Truf­faut (albeit in their case with gen­res such as crime and melo­dra­ma), Demy looked to the films he loved sim­ply as a point to jump off. From there he goes his own way and turns that most Amer­i­can of forms into some­thing refresh­ing and dis­tinct­ly of its place and period.

The Young Girls of Rochefort is out now on Blu-ray cour­tesy of the BFI.