The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

This film depicts a world of artists.  There are the twins Solange and Delphine, a composer and a dancer respectively. There’s also their mother Yvonne and her lost lover, a music shop owner named Simon Dame (neither of whom knows the other is also in Rochefort).

Solange and Delphine long to find their soulmates, but neither of them has met anyone lately and they spend most of their time and energy on their art.  They plan to move to Paris where they can really flourish.  While they prepare, we see that two other artists have recently arrived in Rochefort: a young painter named Maxence, and a renowned American composer named Andy Miller.  The film starts on the day a fair arrives in town and ends when the fair packs up and leaves. The fair brings two more of the film’s main characters into Rochefort: the carnies Bill and Etienne, who quickly befriend Yvonne and encounter Solange and Delphine soon after.

The film sets us up to expect romance.  Delphine and Maxence are made out to be soul mates, as are Solange and Andy.  We also have to wonder if Yvonne and Simon will ever meet again after so many years of pining after each other.  But even as the characters’ passions and responsibilities send them traveling all over Rochefort, none of them ever meets the person we expect and hope for them to meet.  By sheer coincidence, Delphine always misses meeting Maxence, sometimes just barely.  Solange misses Andy in the same way, and Yvonne misses Simon.

At first, it's amusing how they bounce around the city without meeting the person they long for.  But the more it happens, the more it feels like a tragic reminder of how much we may be missing without even knowing it.  Jacques Demy dedicated his first feature, Lola, to Max Ophüls, a maker of films whose characters are often propelled through life by romances that don't come true, and which wring their hands over the devastating consequences of failing to notice the things that pass us by.

Lola and its quasi-sequel The Umbrellas of Cherbourg contemplate this. Lola's characters constantly pass from one facet of their lives into another, none fully grasping the multifaceted nature of another.  Sometimes it leads them down a dead-end path, but brief moments of romance that stick with them forever can still happen.

In The Young Girls of Rochefort, random people on the street dance along with the score, and spontaneously add accents to the main characters’ musical numbers. Some people in Rochefort are dressed normally, others are decorated with streaming ribbons.  Its look is light and airy: its white backgrounds and bright lighting make its colors glow, while the pastel palette keeps them from being overstimulating.

The music, with its swing and breezy tempo, also departs from Michel Legrand's work in Demy's other films.  The film as a whole is closer to American musicals.  In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg the music is constant and uniquely conversational.  In Une Chambre en Ville (not Legrand), the music is operatic. In both films, the colors are deep and intense. There's little if any dancing in either film.  In Rochefort, there's a great deal of dancing. It blends the qualities of those other films with the light-footed spirit of American musicals of the 30s and 50s.  Pauline Kael believed this showed Demy did not understand American musicals.  Jonathan Rosenbaum, on the other hand, believed the point was to mix them into something unique.

When it was released in 1967, conservatives in France held that American culture was contaminated by consumerism, and lesser in spiritual value compared to the French culture with its long, rich history. Some took that to the conclusion that the purity of French culture needed to be protected from foreign influence. In The Young Girls of Rochefort, when Gene Kelly appears on the screen and graces us with a tap dance number – the best-choreographed number in the film – it becomes clear where this film stands.

The Young Girls of Rochefort turns the world into an instrument of expression for its characters.  It is their artistic goals that tie everything together in the end: the characters' encounters come from the fact that all of them intend to leave Rochefort for Paris, where they hope to take their art to the next level.  There are possible connections everywhere, yet there is a lurking dark side as well, consisting in many missed encounters for that and peripheral characters' lives falling apart off-screen, mentioned so quickly you might forget them.

Again, Demy's other films don't include dance nearly to the same extent as Rochefort.  It's one way it more closely resembles the American musicals, where dance is in fact more important than music. But the dancing in American musicals is intricate, acrobatic, exhilarating, even intimidating. You're amazed people can move their bodies like that. In Rochefort, it's more relaxed, even when it's Gene Kelly's turn. The American musicals occupy a world of blazing imagination, testing the limits of what the human body can accomplish. Rochefort lives somewhere between them and real life, more like a playful daydream. The film's take on perfection is ironic and humorous. When Delphine sings of she imagines her soulmate, she gets way too specific. She imagines him as a "philosopher with a democratic spirit," like a 1967 version of "Short Skirt/Long Jacket." It depicts artists drawn out into the world, whose creations overlap. Demy's films are tragic in many ways, but not quite like Ophüls's.  At the end of the road, Ophüls leaves us to reflect on the desolation that has been wrought. Demy takes a step after that reflection into the self-consciousness of one who is both actor and spectator whose creations overlap with and complement others', even though they may eventually have to part ways. 

The original version of this review is posted here.  The version that appears here is substantially modified.