It's probably pure chance that I saw this film for the first time - in the restored version by Agnes Varda - a few days after I was leafing through Demy's Collected Lyrics which have recently been published in France. It's clear from Frame #1 that this is a film to which you either have to surrender as the credits roll or squirm in embarrassment for the next two hours. Demy's 'fairy-tale' is as unashamedly full of coincidences as any Shakespeare comedy even to the extent of employing one set of twins, albeit non-identical but played by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Francois Dorleac. If you're going to stop and wonder why the streets are always available for dancing in - i.e. traffic-free - or why Danielle Darrieux runs a cafe/bar which is little more than a counter, a glass roof and no substantial walls, then you're in the wrong movie. Demy loved chocolate-box movies and he complemented them with chocolate-box music from Michel Legrand - I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I already knew the main love them via its English lyric by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, You Must Believe In Spring, recorded definitively by Marlene VerPlanck - and the score, on the whole is lush without being memorable and ranging from fifties type small combo jazz to all-out string ensembles and if everyone - including Gene Kelly - except Danielle Darrieux is dubbed so what. Jacques Perrin is also on hand as a love-sick sailor, what else, and after seeing him play more or less the same role (narrator) in both Cinema Paradiso and Les Choristes the effect is like seeing a photograph of a friend acquired in middle age when he was a young man. Definitely worth a second viewing and who knows, I may even go so far as to buy the DVD.
Review of The Young Girls of Rochefort
