‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: The 1960s movie Greta Gerwig labelled “astonishingly beautiful”
Greta Gerwig defied all expectations when she turned one of the most divisive dolls of all time into a surreal Oscar-winner that balances social commentary with absurdist comedy. Barbie raked in nearly $1.5billion at the box office to become the highest-grossing film of 2023 and kicked off an international frenzy for all things hot pink.
Regardless of what you think about the film’s attempts at balancing corporate and social interests, there is no denying that Gerwig put her love of film history on full display. From the Stanley Kubrick homage at the beginning that mimics the iconic opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Busby Berkeley style choreography and the lightning-fast dialogue that evokes the classic romantic comedy His Girl Friday, Barbie is chock-full of references hidden behind all the pink and glitter.
One of Gerwig’s biggest visual inspirations for Barbie was the 1964 French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Directed by Jacques Demy and starring Catherine Deneuve, it’s a much more tragic story than Gerwig’s blockbuster. The plot follows a teenage shop assistant who falls in love with a mechanic, only to be separated from him when he is drafted into the Algerian War. When she discovers she is pregnant, and his letters stop arriving, she bends to her social pressure and marries a wealthy jeweller. The film is known for its striking visual style of pastel colours, but its story is much more closely related to realism than romance.
When speaking about The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Gerwig said, “[T]hat’s an amazing movie and astonishingly beautiful. I loved the use of colour and the surrealness. [Director of photography] Rodrigo Prieto and I – he shot the film, and he’s one of the greatest DPs who ever lived – were talking about that layering of the colours and how you’d shoot five different shades of pink or red in one shot and not have it overwhelm anything, that you feel like there’s separation, but that it’s vibrant. Everything feels painterly, and that was a big part of it.”
Unlike Barbie, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg uses the musical genre as a contrast with its subject matter. Geneviève’s situation is tragic but not extraordinary, and though every line of dialogue is sung and the colour palette ravishing, the story feels all too real. Most of the filmmakers who defined the French New Wave in the ‘60s embraced stripped-back, monochromatic black-and-white cinematography to convey realism, but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg takes a bold step in the other direction, achieving realism through a vivid, fairytale style that has influenced filmmakers for generations.
Though its connection to Barbie is clear (even Margot Robbie’s hairstyle mimics Deneuve’s), the echoes of Demy’s masterpiece are even more apparent in another recent musical, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, which features a similar story of young love torn apart by real life.
Like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Chazelle’s film uses the trappings of a lavish musical to tell a story that is rooted in realism, right down to the heartbreaking but believable ending. It’s no surprise that Chazelle identifies Demy’s film as the greatest movie of all time.
