Jacques Demy

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.

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Film Info

  • France
  • 1964
  • 92 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • French
  • Spine #716

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Once Upon a Time . . . “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a 2008 documentary
  • Interview from 2014 with film scholar Rodney Hill
  • French television interview from 1964 featuring director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand discussing the film
  • Audio recordings of interviews with actor Catherine Deneuve (1983) and Legrand (1991) at the National Film Theatre in London
  • Restoration demonstration
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Jim Ridley

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

The Essential Jacques Demy

The Essential Jacques Demy

Blu-ray Box Set

6 Discs

$99.96

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Once Upon a Time . . . “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a 2008 documentary
  • Interview from 2014 with film scholar Rodney Hill
  • French television interview from 1964 featuring director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand discussing the film
  • Audio recordings of interviews with actor Catherine Deneuve (1983) and Legrand (1991) at the National Film Theatre in London
  • Restoration demonstration
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Jim Ridley
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Cast
Catherine Deneuve
Geneviève Emery
Nino Castelnuovo
Guy Foucher
Anne Vernon
Madame Emery
Marc Michel
Roland Cassard
Ellen Farner
Madeleine
Mireille Perrey
Aunt Élise
Credits
Director
Jacques Demy
Written by
Jacques Demy
Original music by
Michel Legrand
Cinematographer
Jean Rabier
Production designer
Bernard Evein
Costume designer
Jacqueline Moreau
Editors
Monique Teisseire
Editors
Anne-Marie Cotret
Producer
Mag Bodard

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Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.

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Restoration Spotlight

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Explore

Catherine Deneuve

Actor

Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve

One of cinema’s great beauties, Catherine Deneuve (born Catherine Dorléac in Paris in 1943) is also an icon of the transformative cinematic 1960s. The daughter of two actors and the sister of three (one of whom, Françoise Dorléac, died in a car crash in 1967), Deneuve has acting in her blood. After her major breakthrough in Jacques Demy’s poignant 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Deneuve continued to prove she was more than just a pretty face in Roman Polanski’s thriller Repulsion and Luis Buñuel’s surreal erotic daydream Belle de jour. Those films may exploit Deneuve’s crystalline loveliness for its seeming inscrutability, but her portrayals of sexual repression in both (and her shocking embodiment of schizophrenia in the former) make for two of the most vivid performances of the era. Those roles set her on the path to becoming a full-fledged movie star, and she went on to act for François Truffaut, Alain Cavalier, Marco Ferreri, and Jean-Pierre Melville. Her performances have grown richer as she’s aged; today, she is a true grand dame of the cinema, and her compellingly enigmatic looks—once interpreted as fragile—have taken on a mature imperiousness, as evidenced in such films as Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (in which she costars with her daughter with Marcello Mastroianni, Chiara Mastroianni).

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