Dipping My Toes in French New Wave: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Breathless

It has been an interesting week since my first entry, with lots of people answering my call and recommending lots of New Wave flicks. Super happy about it, guys, but the unfortunate thing is that I won't be able to watch everything you recommend by the end of the month. I only have eight spots, and half of them have been filled already! However, I'll continue on this education in the many years of life I still hopefully have to live. Anyway, this week's pickings were the musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

I consider myself to be quite the fan of musicals. Sure, 80% of them are really cheesy, but if the cheese is melted you right, I can't think of anything more fun. Then there's the other side to musicals: you know, Les Misberables, The Phantom of the Opera etc. These films bring sadness to songs, making heartache mean something so different. And you know what? I love it just as much as I love to see people dancing around in buses in the middle of the day. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is unlike anything I've seen before, though. This film does not have a spoken word of dialogue: everything is sung. I was very confused as to whether this was a New Wave film, since it didn't really look like any of the other ones, but then I realised that it was quite an experiment. It was very hard to get into the fact that no-one was going to just talk to each other, but once I came around, this more was a brilliant experience. As brilliant as it was, though, it was absolutely devastating.

The basic story is that young Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve, who is like my new favourite actress), who lives with her mother at an umbrella shop, secretly falls in love with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), which her mother disapproves of. Guy is sent off to war, and when he leaves Geneviève discovers that she is pregnant. While he is gone, the wealthy Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) falls in love with her, and offers to marry her and bring the child up as his own. The film is absolutely heart-breaking. And it is simple heart-break, too, which is made even more heart-breaking by the way song and music is weaved into the plot. In fact, just thinking about it now makes my heart hurt a little. However, while the film is doused in sadness, it is extremely beautiful to look at. The 60's were such a colourful era, and director Jacques Demy uses colour to it's full extent. The art direction is beautifully bright and vibrant - for example, the house that Geneviève and her mother live in is filled with pastel pinks and purples, instead of boring creams like most houses. My eyes had a love affair with this movie. Which makes it the ultimate paradox: even though this movie made me hopelessly sad, I am helplessly in love with it.

A more typical New Wave film was Breathless. In amidst all of the recommendations I received in the past week, a whole lot of people had been warning me that Jean-Luc Godard's stuff wasn't the easiest to get into. So naturally, I was a little weary going into Breathless, but I came out absolutely loving it. As I've said time and time again, I love seeing conversations play out on screen. In this film, there's lots of that happening, but adding to the beauty of people communicating is the French language. I never realised how much I actually wanted to continue my 8 year old dream to learn French fluently until I watched this film. To add to the beautiful talking, there was such a beautiful feel to go with it. Black-and-white is another favourite thing of mine - it has this weird power to make everything just look better - and it is used wonderfully in this film. Everyone just walks and talks with that stylish air about them, which I absolutely loved. Even without the use of colour, I fell in love with this movie just as much as I fell in love with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Everything about this seems so real, mainly because Godard chose to make this film like a documentary. There wasn't a lot of technical trickery going on (in fact, many scenes were just shot with a hand-held camera and nothing else), which drew me into the world that car thief Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American girlfriend Patricia (Jean Seberg) inhabited. The editing, also, was quite interesting to see. There were random jump cuts (possibly used to just cut out unimportant material), so things didn't really flow, per se. Everything is so spontaneous, which is what I loved most about it. The characters, who are really only the deluded, Humphrey Bogart wannabe Michel and the aspiring young journalism student Patricia, are also really interesting to watch, particularly because of the chemistry between Belmondo and Seberg. They bring life to the already lively dialogue, and beauty to the already beautiful atmosphere. Breathless was extremely interesting to watch and absorb, and like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it is likely to factor high into my favourite films of all time list.

What do you think of these films? Are you a fan of Jean-Luc Godard? A fan of musicals?