French Cinematheque: UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

Co-presented by the Alliance Française of Greenwich

The Magical World of Jacques Demy

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

A brand new 50th anniversary digital restoration

Post-film discussion with Professor Anne Kern (SUNY Purchase)

Call the box office for tickets 203.967.3660x2

“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.”
- Los Angeles Times

ABOUT THE FILM: Jacques Demy's 1964 masterpiece is a pop-art opera, or, to borrow the director's own description, a film in song. This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo), a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery (a luminous Catherine Deneuve), 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 (Marc Michel, reprising his role from Demy's masterful debut, Lola). A completely sung movie, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is closest in form to a cinematic opera. Composer Michel Legrand composed the score, modeling it around the patterns of everyday conversation.
Not Rated | In French with English subtitles | 91 minutes

ABOUT ANNE KERN: Anne M. Kern is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Film Studies and Comparative Literature from Yale University, and has published on European and American cinema, surrealism and psychoanalysis, including a recent essay on three early Renoir films in A Companion to Jean Renoir. She is currently completing a book-length project titled A Sense of Play: Instances of the Ludic in Twentieth Century European Film & Theory. Dr. Kern also serves as a Board Member of both the Alliance Française of Greenwich and the Focus on French Cinema film festival.