If The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the shot, Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort) is the lighthearted chaser. After Umbrellas, Jacques Demy wanted to pivot to musical comedies uncommonly filmed in France and diametrically opposed to his previous film. Umbrellas was sung from start to finish; there was only one song that could barely live free of its source material. It also did not include choreographed dance numbers typical to the genre. Most importantly, it focused on the pain inherent in love. The Young Girls of Rochefort is chock full of joy and seemingly everyone is boogieing down. Even the simple act of walking down the street is met with fanfare. The plot is the fluffiest I’ve encountered, filled with silly misunderstandings and coincidences that are more enjoyable than they are tedious. But as Jacques Demy said himself, the plot doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the vibes.
The film focuses on twin sisters Solange (Françoise Dorléac) and Delphine (Catherine Deneuve). Frustrated with their lack of romantic prospects they put into motion a plan to move to Paris to pursue their dreams to dance, write music, and fall in love. Françoise and Catherine were real-life sisters (although not twins), and the chemistry between the two is off the charts. Their beguiling demeanor has not gone unnoticed by two men they have little interest in – Guillaume (Jacques Riberolles), an art gallery owner that peppers Delphine with marriage proposals she continually rebuffs and Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli), a lonely music store owner that believes Solange will be a great composer.
“We’re just two little girls from Little Rock…”
While Françoise had danced before, this film was Catherine’s first foray into it, diving head first into the deep end of the pool by portraying a ballet instructor. Although Gene Kelly was asked to choreograph the film he turned down the offer in order to stay in the US and spend time with his children. Norman Maen, an English choreographer was hired instead. The sisters spent several weeks in London for rehearsals leading up to filming, with Catherine in 3 months of dance classes before that. She found it difficult to lip sync and dance at the same time. You would never know based on what showed on film in Rochefort, but you see echoes of this insecurity in 8 Femmes later.
A small excitement is added to the girls’ lives when a traveling boat show/faire arrives in Rochefort. Their mother Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux) owns a café in the town square and quickly makes friends with Etienne (George Chakiris) and Bill (Grover Dale), two men who arrive with the troupe. Yvonne trusts them immediately for whatever reason, enough to ask them to pick up her son Bouboo from school. In pursuit of their task they run into Delphine who happened to also be there to pick up her little brother. She quickly decides visiting her art gallery friend is more important than ensuring her little brother’s safety and similarly leaves Bouboo in the care of two strange men that do not stay in one place too long.
You may recognize George Chakiris as the ill-fated Bernardo from West Side Story, but he’s been in the background of a few other films on this list. He steals every scene that he’s in – every other dancer could be spinning plates on sticks while their costumes are on fire and I’d still be fixated on George.
Etienne and Bill aren’t the only attractive young men hanging out in Yvonne’s café – Maxence (Jacques Perrin) is a young soldier and artist who longs to find a very specific woman he dreamed up and painted, as if it wasn’t hard enough to find someone to love without such stringent qualifications. Guillaume hung this painting in his gallery, and when Delphine finally stumbles upon it and notices it looks exactly like her, she realizes that the man she’s been dreaming about actually exists and she needs to go to Paris to find him. How convenient… It’s also bonkers this guy is a regular at her mom’s café and they haven’t encountered each other once.
Solange is similarly hunting for a specific man, except she already knows his name – Andrew Miller, a famous American composer. She convinces her music store owning-friend Simon to write to him on her behalf since they were old schoolmates, but little does she know that in a few minutes she would run straight into him while dragging Bouboo away from two strange carnies sent to school to pick up her brother again.
The way I screamed in surprise when I saw Gene Kelly, you guys. Truly the American who never left Paris. Except this one time, right now, because he’s in Rochefort.
This is like the greatest hits of Gene Kelly, with references to An American in Paris and On The Town. Just look at those sailor suits – they come out of nowhere when every other soldier is wearing little pom-pom hats. The production had to move the entire shooting schedule back two to three weeks to accommodate Gene Kelly and I have never thanked god harder for Microsoft Excel after listening to the explanation how they manually had to change the production board when the timetables needed to be altered.
Like Cinderella, Solange leaves behind her composition as a calling card, and Andy here is immediately enamored with her. She doesn’t think he’s too bad either, and like, I’m pretty sure if I encountered Gene Kelly in the street I would similarly freak out. Solange immediately believes this is a missed connection and she’ll never encounter her foreigner again, so although she is smitten, the meet cute doesn’t deter her from her plans of heading to Paris to find Andy.
Meanwhile, Yvonne’s new friends Etienne and Bill are in a pickle – the two showgirls they brought with them to help sell boat motors dumped their butts for a couple of soldiers with eyes so blue you could swim in them. After encouragement from Yvonne, they approach her daughters as replacements since they are told they’re excellent performers, and they already know how beautiful they are. The girls agree only on the stipulation they can hitch a ride to Paris with the troupe afterward.
One of my favorite things in this movie is all the actors badly pretending to play several instruments. Solange has a great moment where she even gets the sound of a flute to come out of her recorder, which is only more hilarious later when you discover she is also hoarding a flute in this apartment.
It’s the next day and there’s been a murder! A former showgirl was cut up and placed in a wicker basket outside of her house. Everyone is curious about who committed this heinous act and have gathered by the crime scene to gawk at the people hosing the blood off the street. But this hard left turn hasn’t halted fair preparations or Andy trying to track down Simon.
Similar to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, all the actors (except Danielle Darrieux) were dubbed over with another singer, several of them repeating talents from Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Even Gene Kelly’s vocals were dubbed which surprised me since there’s a vast catalog of movies that definitively prove he can sing. Apparently his singing range wasn’t “good enough” to carry this role so they did it anyway. Some of his dialogue was similarly dubbed even though Gene spoke French fairly well, which was incredibly distracting since the person they hired (and apparently didn’t pay to record the English dub) sounds almost 20 years younger than Gene should. In the cases where dubbing was necessary, George Chakiris and Grover Dale didn’t speak any French going into the film and had to learn their lines phonetically, which apparently amused Catherine when she would hear them practice. Dale was also a last minute replacement for Nino Castelnuovo, who had a schedule conflict for Rochefort. This is why Bill’s backstory is similar to Guy’s character in Umbrellas – it was intended to be an easter egg to Demy’s previous film but turned into a random nod instead.
There is a mythologized English version of this film where the actors lip-synced the songs in English while the dialogue remained in French. Aside from these clips I found on YouTube and footage of the songs being filmed in the anniversary documentary there is very little information about this other than it theoretically didn’t do well in US theaters so they didn’t bother to release it on home video or consider it for restoration it when they restored the original French version in both 1998 and 2011. I’m also curious how much the French dialogue deterred the movie’s success if the intention was to court the ‘I won’t read subtitles’ crowd.
When Andy finally discovers Simon he regales his encounter with a beautiful local composer. Simon finds this entertaining until Andy starts to play Solange’s calling card and Simon vaguely recognizes it. Simon’s wistful confession of his own love for Solange is also super creepy because he doesn’t know he’s kind of her stepdad? Yeah, surprise! Simon is Bouboo’s real father and he doesn’t know it because after telling Simon she was pregnant, Yvonne had a friend tell Simon she married a random rich dude and moved to Mexico because she couldn’t bear to be named Madame Dame. This is why it’s better to date within your age range if you know there’s a kid of yours floating around out there.
Day of the fair arrives and the sister’s students are set to perform. On another stage Delphine and Solange put on their own show to advertise motorcycles, I guess. Their performance goes so well Etienne and Bill proposition them for sex afterward, which neither of them are amused with.
This is very Gentlemen Prefer Blondes coded, down to the costumes.
The next morning it is discovered that the old-man side character, Yvonne’s father’s old buddy Dutrouz, is the mysterious murderer, which is shocking since he doesn’t even know how to properly slice a cake. This strange revelation is blown off pretty quickly because this movie likes to hint at a dark underbelly but doesn’t choose to immerse itself in it. I believe it’s to showcase how love can completely envelope and blind one to the ills of the world around them, but it also might be an example of the kind of thing that happens when love goes wrong. This dude held a grudge for 40 years and one painting of Delphine was enough to remind him of his jilted love and plunge a knife into her.
The girls are running late to meet their carnies to head into Paris. Simon drops by to tell Solange that Andy is waiting for her in his shop, and in the long tradition of passing the responsibility of handling Bouboo on someone else, Solange asks Mr. Dame to go pick him up in return. When Delphine mentions to her mother Solange’s weird older friend with the amusing name was headed to unknownlingy meet his son for the first time, Yvonne bolts from the cafe to meet him and rekindle their romance.
Maxence, although he has not encountered his dream woman, is on cloud nine after his conscription has finally run its course. He heads to the café to wish Yvonne well since he is also planning on leaving Rochefort that afternoon in pursuit of Paris and a career painting strange women that appear in his dreams. After another frustrating miss of a chance encounter between Delphine and Maxence at the café, we begin to believe they’ll never be together.
Conversely, Solange and Andy are delighted to discover they are each other’s random love encounters.
Abandoned by Solange to pursue a life with Gene Kelly, which like, who fucking wouldn’t, Delphine leaves with the weirdly forward carnies. Maxence, hitchhiking on the side of the road for some reason, jumps in one of the carnival cars giving us a little glimmer of hope that he and Delphine got their happy ending after all.
The city of Rochefort has really embraced this film, noting The Young Girls of Rochefort made the area a tourist destination in the subsequent years. In The Young Girls Turn 25, a documentary about the city’s anniversary celebration for Rochefort, several citizens who participated in the film as extras talked about how the filming experience was akin to a 4-month party. The city of Rochefort was chosen because of Colbert Square, giving a centralized location for the majority of the film to take place in. Inspired by the paintings of Raoul Dufy, the buildings around the city that would show up on camera were painted white with their window shutters accented in bright, beautiful colors by the crew. The shooting also brought in a lot of new business – Yvonne’s glass café is still open with a statue of the sisters in their “Chanson de Jumelles” costumes placed out front. Jacques Demy passed away in 1990, and Françoise tragically died in a car accident a few months after this film was released. The city dedicated street names in their memories – Jacques Demy Ave. leads to the famous Pont Transbordeur from the beginning of the film, and Pl. Françoise Dorléac runs outside of the city’s bus station.
The Young Girls of Rochefort continues to impact movie aesthetics today. Just in the past few years Jacques Demy’s films have been name-dropped as direct influences for Past Lives, Barbie and La La Land, which I will unfortunately be watching next on the list while Mr. Demy is still fresh in my mind… God help me. I’m sure it can’t compare to Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Young Girls of Rochefort – these films are escapism at its finest. Jacques Demy himself said he used movies as a way to escape the trauma he experienced as a boy during World War II – a fantasy land to visit after discovering your own is imperfect and full of pain. While Umbrellas operated like time travel, transporting me to a past when I was young and haven’t experienced heartbreak, Rochefort is a world I would like to live in the present. It’s a place where problems are superficial and solvable through song and dance numbers. Where people are one street corner away from meeting their one true love.