The Young Girls of Rochefort
d. Jacques Demy, 1967
Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort would be my own choice for the most enjoyable of all movie musicals. Demy's film is so formally astonishing it surpasses even the best Hollywood musicals from which it gains its inspiration; don't get me wrong, I love Singin' in the Rain and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as much as the next guy, but there's something about what Demy and Michel Legrand - who wrote and conducted the music - do here that I've seen nowhere else. The Young Girls of Rochefort even manages to be more than an exceptional musical; it tells a universal story about missed and fulfilled opportunities. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compares it to Playtime in its portrayal of these connections, and it's easy to spot elements of Jacques Tati through Demy's film. The cast - which includes real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac as the young girls and Gene Kelly as an American musician - is all around amazing, and the choreography is as creative as any ever put on screen. Cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet (who also shot Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar) takes full advantage of the town of Rochefort, with the action being mostly centered around the town square. The Young Girls of Rochefort takes place over the span of a weekend, culminating in a fair on Sunday; the rest of the film is filled with characters trying to find the person that makes them happy, and through a series of occurrences eventually come to find them. In his review of the film, Rosenbaum also points out that though the film ends in a happy mood (everyone meets the person they need), what sticks with the viewer is the sense of dissolution (the path they had to go through to reach the person), as there are many sad moments throughout the film. Rarely has the screen been a place filled with such loveliness.
