Synopsis
This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher, a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery, an employee in her widowed mother's chic but financially embattled umbrella shop. On the evening before Guy is to leave for a two-year tour of combat in Algeria, he and Geneviève make love. She becomes pregnant and must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Catherine DeneuveGeneviève Emery
- Nino CastelnuovoGuy
- Anne VernonMadame Emery
- Mireille PerreyTante Élise
- Marc MichelRoland Cassard
- Ellen FarnerMadeleine
- Jean ChampionAubin
- Pierre CadenBernard
- Jean-Pierre DoratJean
- Bernard FradetGas Station Apprentice
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Reader
A heartfelt, passionate, tragic musical suite made up of these formulas, which the film both celebrates and wryly examines to discover their inner logic: how they actually work, what they do and don't do. - 90
Washington Post
Demy, his cinematographer Jean Rabier and production designer Bernard Evein created an operatic masterpiece of romanticism, which makes a modest but effective antidote to the harsh era of cynicism that has pervaded world cinema ever since. - 90
Washington Post
A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history. - 90
Los Angeles Times
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has stood the test of time as beautifully as Deneuve and seems likely to enchant future generations as fully as it has audiences over the past four decades. - 88
Chicago Sun-Times
A surprisingly effective film, touching and knowing and, like Deneuve, ageless. - 88
ReelViews
Although most movies favor passion and true love, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg shows that another less demanding, more subtle kind of love has its own appeal. - 70
Village Voice
The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop. - 70
TV Guide Magazine
By inflating the life of a common shop girl into a musical spectacle, Demy succeeds in turning a tedious existence into a fantasy, yet he and cinematographer Jean Rabier and art director Bernard Evein do so without creating a false world. [review of original release]
