La Grande Fête: ‘The Young Girls of Rochefort’ (1967)

This post is part of the Vive la France! Blogathon, hosted by Lady Eve’s Reel Life and Silver Screen Modes. See the other posts here.

Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort or The Young Girls of Rochefort is the essence of euphoria. A carnival of colour and sound, it looks at the world through a kaleidoscope and finds a jamboree of wonder. It revels in the joy of being alive.

It’s summer in the port town of Rochefort and a carnival rolls in, including barkers Etienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale), who set up shop in the town square. Across the street is a studio run by the titular young girls, twin sisters Delphine and Solange Garnier (played by real-life sisters Catherine Denueve and Françoise Dorléac), who dream of careers in the arts: Delphine as a dancer; Solange as a composer. Their mother Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux) runs a café; years ago, she broke up with her boyfriend, only to realise, too late, that he was the love of her life. Across town, Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) owns a music shop and pines after his lost love, who left France for Mexico. One of Yvonne’s regulars is Maxence (Jacques Perrin), a poet and painter who’s doing his national service at Rochefort’s naval base and searching for his ‘ideal woman’. And an old friend of Simon’s, a famous American pianist named Andy Miller (Gene Kelly), happens to be passing through. Everyone runs into everyone else over the same long weekend.

The version of Rochefort on screen exists as its own discrete world, one that could only have been created by Jacques Demy. Part of the creative swell of the Nouvelle Vague, Demy made films, many of them musicals, distinguished by their lyricism and visual style. Young Girls blazes with colour: dresses, shirts, skirts, berets, shutters, doors, even street signs. Demy, cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, set designer Bernard Evein and costume designer Jacqueline Moreau fill the screen with sorbet pinks and yellows, fever-dream oranges, sizzling blues—block colours with a of dearth patterns and prints. The entire town is a rainbow-hued paradise and all its inhabitants players, buoyed by the same sense of fun. When Delphine goes for a stroll, several Rochefortais dance around her, a man cartwheels past her on the pavement and sailors lift and carry her with casual ease.

Demy’s Rochefort is also a wonderland where the improbable is commonplace. Simon Dame’s girlfriend rejected his marriage proposal because she couldn’t suffer the indignity of being known as ‘Madame Dame’. Maxence, a dreamer with the face of a Botticelli cherub, searches for his ‘feminine ideal’, a woman whose face he has never seen and yet whose portrait he has painted. He sings about his quest to a chorus of patrons at Yvonne’s café: “She is his only love/But what good is a dream?” they reply, sympathetically. Maxence’s naïveté would be cloying, but for Perrin’s sincerity and the sweetness of Demy and Michel Legrand’s music and lyrics. By astonishing coincidence, Maxence’s painting is the spitting image of Delphine, who is on her own quest for her ‘ideal man’. If only they knew about each other.

The film’s screenwriter as well as lyricist, Demy brings his characters together in every possible configuration except the one which would resolve their storylines, keeping the plot moving and his audience in (sometimes exasperated) suspense. Those who need to meet keep missing each other or don’t realise they’ve already been introduced. Like Marcel Carné, Demy is fascinated by disparate groups drawn together by fate. When Delphine decides to search for her ideal man in Paris, Demy has her spurned suitor Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles) retort with a paraphrase of a line from Les Enfants du Paradis, Carné’s epic mosaic of interlocking lives (“Paris is small for those who share so great a passion as yours.”).

The Young Girls of Rochefort is also Demy’s tribute to the Hollywood musical and it shows. More traditional than Demy’s previous film, the completely sung-though The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Young Girls intersperses its songs with dialogue and dance. It’s also much more optimistic than either Cherbourg or Demy’s bittersweet first film, Lola. Plus there’s the presence of West Side Story’s George Chakiris and of course, Gene Kelly.

An ardent Francophile, Kelly throws himself into Demy’s film with exuberance. Andy and Solange meet and time stands still, but she hurries off, leaving him love struck in the street, literally dancing and singing with joy. Kelly spoke French but sadly his voiced is dubbed in everything except two brief dialogue scenes, and by a man who sings in a higher register than Kelly’s own. It’s a little jarring. Thankfully, he still gets to do his own dancing and is glorious to behold. Choreographer Norman Maen lovingly includes nods to Kelly’s earlier work, with one routine matching him first with a pair of sailors (Anchors Aweigh, On the Town) and then a gaggle of eager schoolboys (An American in Paris).

The film’s music and lyrics are spectacular. Michel Legrand, Demy’s frequent collaborator and friend, contributes an entire score of catchy melodies, all perfectly in harmony with Demy’s lyrics and sun-drenched world. Etienne and Bill’s cheeky ‘Nous voyageons de ville en ville’, an ode to life on the road, and ‘Chanson des jumelles’, Solange and Delphine’s signature song, will be lodged in your head for days.

Young Girls’ cast is excellent too. Deneuve and Dorléac strike the perfect balance between whimsy and irony and their real-life bond gives extra weight to even the smallest gestures of sisterly affection. Chakiris and Grover Dale share a convincing camaraderie, dancing like they’ve known each other for years. And Danielle Darrieux and Michel Piccoli are wistful, but never maudlin, as they contemplate the roads not taken.

For all its sunshine, The Young Girls of Rochefort isn’t without shadows. Newspapers report trouble elsewhere; more alarmingly, a vicious murder takes place off screen. (The idiosyncratic rules of Demy’s world mean the characters sing a few blasé songs about it, and then get on with their day.) Yet the film remains essentially optimistic. “Vivre cette une fête!” Delphine sings. Life is a celebration. The Young Girls of Rochefort is a paean to loving and living with an open heart.