Perhaps it was a bit premature to buy the Jacques Demy Box Set of Blu Rays sight unseen, but the Criterion Collection was having a sale! And I'd been reading about this film for a while (and somehow getting it confused with Last Year in Marienbad) so, what the hell! And it turns out not to have been an entirely foolish purchase, at least on the evidence of this one, which more-or-less made Catherine Deneuve a star.
The story is (purposely) slight: boy and girl are in love, boy sleeps with girl once before going to war, while he's gone, girl realizes she's pregnant and is talked into marrying a nice, wealthy young man, boy comes back with a limp and is distraught until he finds a different nice girl. What makes it unique, apart from the lush pop colors, is that the entire movie is sung. It's billed as a musical (and what prompted us to watch it was a list of the best musicals for each year that picked it for 1964), but I'd say it's more like an opera, because, unlike most musicals, there aren't "musical numbers," featuring standalone songs, with regular speaking bits in between, the whole thing is seamless, with every line sung. And it works - it's not intrusive at all, but is instead completely charming. It helps, of course, that it has such beautiful people as Catherine Deneuve (Geneviève), Nino Castelnuovo (Guy) (who, for some reason, kept reminding me of the rather weasly Casey Affleck)
and Anne Vernon (Geneviève's glamorous mother) sashaying through it. Its title comes from the shop that Geneviève's mother owns, which, predictably enough, is always struggling to stay afloat.
Guy, meanwhile, works as a mechanic at a garage, and dreams of owning his own "all white" gas station (and has a little model of one in the room he lives in in the apartment of the old lady, his Godmother, who raised him. She is always dying by inches, and is nursed by a very nice young orphan, Madeleine who clearly worships Guy, a fact he appears oblivious to. I must confess that I found the beginning section, where Guy and Geneviève swan around professing undying love to each other dragged a bit (although it was gorgeous to look at and very easy on the ear), but gradually the film got under my skin, and by the time Guy returns I was gripped. It is, as I said, purposely low key. Nothing very outrageous happens, and when characters die, or Guy gets injured, it happens off-screen (unlike Guy, shipped to Algeria (the film takes place between '57 and '63), we never leave Cherbourg. And after the first third, the lovers are separated, so that we spend the second third entirely with Geneviève, and the final one with Guy. Only at the very end do they meet again,
and it is not the Hollywood reunion that it would have been in Hollywood. Guy does get his white garage, and Madeleine gets her man. Only Geneviève seems unfulfilled, which is a bit sad for her thoroughly decent and well-meaning husband, surely the only decent diamond salesman in the world, Roland (a character who was unlucky in love in the earliest film in our box set that we'll get to eventually).
He knows the daughter Geneviève bears (Francoise) is not his, but loves her so deeply he is entirely content to raise her as if she is. So overall, a tale of first love and the compromises that adults have to make afterwards, with no villains and the only deaths being of natural causes. Slight, but unforgettable.
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