The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

The final few shots of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg compose one of the most moving scenes I've seen in a film.  All it shows us is a man, viewed from a distance, smiling as he sees his wife and son return from a short outing on a snowy but unremarkable night, and playing with his son in the snow for a bit.  Similarly effective scenes from other movies are longer, wordier, and closer to the action.  

The scene takes place after the final encounter between Genevieve and Guy, the two central characters.  The film is divided into three chapters, first with Genevieve and Guy in love before he's drafted, then Genevieve's experience of his absence, then his experience after his return.  The entire film is sung, and not in lyrics or distinguishable songs.  Rather, most of the dialogue is ordinary talk given rhythm and melody.  Likewise, the film takes place mostly in ordinary settings, but elevated with lavish colors.  

The most emotionally intense scenes in the film happen in its earlier parts, when Genevieve and Guy are together.  They make grandiose declarations of love to each other, and Genevieve asks how she will go on living after the military takes him.  When they're apart, we see exchanges between Guy, his ailing aunt Elise, and his aunt's live-in nurse Madeleine.  Or, it's Genevieve, her mother, and Roland Cassard, a jewelry salesman who befriends the family after helping them with some debts.  In these scenes, Genevieve and Guy never seem as overwhelmed by the people they're with as they are by each other.  But still, the characters continue to sing, and the colors continue to overflow from the screen.

In the early scenes when they're together, Genevieve and Guy speak of how all they have is each other.  Even though they have separate livelihoods and other people in their lives, their romance is what provides them with a deeply felt sense of a bright future.  When they spend their last night together, the melody Genevieve used earlier to express her sorrow swells on the score and we get a series of shots depicting locations in the town.  They're all empty, as if our leads are the last two people in the world.

Even in moments that are mundane for the characters, and even after Guy leaves, the film remains in this heightened register.  The characters dwell on their memories for a while and then start to move on, but the colors and music never go away.  Something clings to the youthful, starry-eyed sense of world-rending romance.

Before those final shots, when Guy meets Genevieve for the last time, the same music that played at their separation plays.  But they don't sing along.  The echo of a life that could have been is there.  It's touches like this which set The Umbrellas of Cherbourg apart.  They go hand-in-hand with images and melodies carried over from the related 1961 film Lola, and with the crisscrossing stories of 1967's The Young Girls of Rochefort.  All turn your attention to the many facets of others' lives that we don't see, and the fact that others see us the same way.  The pursuit of dreams against chance and limited perception was a pet theme of Demy's Max Ophüls, to whom Demy dedicated his first film.  But where Ophüls crashes and burns, Demy has life go on, set to music.  And there is another side to the music other than the haunting of lost dreams: Lola, Cherbourg, and Rochefort all take rhythms from the workplace, conversation, and the street.  There is an encounter between our specters and the place we immediately find ourselves in.

So, when their song plays, and we see Guy from a distance doing nothing more than smiling as his wife and child return from an outing that couldn't have been more than 5 minutes long, it's a big deal. We know the dream is still there, that there are other, equally powerful parts of life, and that the voices of both will always coexist in our minds.