The Young Girls of Rochefort [Les demoiselles de Rochefort] ***** (1967, Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, Gene Kelly, George Chakiris, Danielle Darrieux) – Classic Movie Review 1946

French movie director Jacques Demy’s 1967 musical follow-up to his 1964 Cannes Palme d’or-winning hit The Umbrellas of Cherbourg [Les parapluies de Cherbourg] is another devastatingly charming, light-hearted, carefree operetta.

It is overloaded with energy, dynamism and imagination, realized in gorgeously splashy pastel-coloured décor, and informed with Demy’s affection for the Hollywood musical genre, which was by then in the mid-to-late-Sixties already defunct. It reunites Demy with his Umbrellas star, Catherine Deneuve.

Real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac delight as dancing teacher Delphine and piano teacher and composer Solange, the two singing and dancing sisters living in the north-west France seaside village of Rochefort.

Jacques Perrin plays Maxence, a poet and painter, who is doing his military service, and Michel Piccoli plays music shop owner Simon, who left Paris a month ago to return to the place he fell in love 10 years earlier. They are all are looking for love and come to the fair at Rochefort – and duly all in and out of love.

There are also appealing, hauntingly nostalgic turns from pianist Gene Kelly, boatman George Chakiris and French cinema icon Danielle Darrieux as the girls’ mother.

Michel Legrand was Oscar-nominated for the catchy score, just as he was for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and he didn’t win all over again. Young Girls is a more traditional musical than Umbrellas with dialogue interspersed with the singing and dancing sequences, and the plot proceeding in a more familiar way.

So, less showy it may be, but that doesn’t stop it being a great musical, especially with Legrand’s music being arguably even sweeter this time. Legrand has won three Oscars – for the Best Original Song The Windmills of Your Mind in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) for Best Music in Summer of ’42 (1971) and Best Music for Yentl (1983).

Grover Dale, Jacques Riberolles, Geneviève Thénier, Henri Crémieux and Pamela Hart also appear.

It is the penultimate film of Françoise Dorléac, who died on 26 June 1967, aged only 25, when her sports car flipped and burned on a road in Nice.

Jacques Demy is best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg [Les parapluies de Cherbourg] (1964), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Lola (1961). He was born on June 5 1931 and was married to Agnès Varda. Tragically, he died on October 27 1990 in Paris of AIDS, aged 59.

Danielle Darrieux was 100 on May 1 2017. She has played Deneuve’s mother in five films: Ladies Man (1960), The Young Girls of Rochefort, Scene of the Crime (1986), 8 Women (2002) and Persepolis (2007). She died on 17 October 2017.

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