antoniocasaca123 This is a very beautiful and realistic film, whose final part messes immensely with us. During the movie we are not expecting such an ending. If it were a North American movie, with the same story, the ending would be different, the unfolding of the film itself would be different and everything would end up in a happy end, even more for a musical. It's not that the movie, as it ends, "ends badly." It ends ... how it has to end.

bigverybadtom The teenage daughter of a woman running a financially-troubled umbrella shop in Cherbourg conflicts with her mother. The slightly older boy working as an auto mechanic at a garage is living with his elderly and sickly godmother, who has a young woman come in occasionally to take care of her, has conflicts of his own. He and the daughter meet and fall in love...but as expected, the boy gets drafted and has to serve in the military for two years with war in Algeria going on. They must separate, but will the romance last? Especially with the daughter unexpectedly pregnant and a rich man also desiring to marry the daughter? The movie has its dialogue entirely sung, and the sets are in very bright colors. Despite this, the characters and their interactions are all believable, and the story line, though not entirely predictable, does follow a logical path. The movie is basically a confection, but it works.

capone666 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Busking is almost like living in a musical except teenagers steal your change-filled hat.Fortunately, the vocalists in this musical have real jobs to do while they sing.Umbrella saleswoman Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) is smitten with mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo). But when he's conscripted into the Algerian war, she is left alone and pregnant in their French village.Encourage by her mother (Anne Vernon) to marry the local jeweler (Marc Michel), Guy returns from war to discover Geneviève has left Cherbourg with the daughter that he never knew he had.Years later, a chance encounter finds the former lovers face to face for the first time in forever.Considered an unorthodox musical on account that all of the dialogue is sung similar to an opera, this brightly hued tale is also unique in its true-to-life take on love and its unpredictability.Interestingly enough, karaoke in Cherbourg is actually talking off-key.Green Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

disinterested_spectator As I sat down to watch this movie, I did not expect to like it. First of all, it is the worst kind of foreign film, which is to say, it is French. I won't elaborate. You are either with me on this or you are not.Then I discovered it is a musical. I like musicals well enough, but when I realized that every line of dialogue was going to be sung throughout, I groaned. One of the great improvements of Hollywood musicals over operas is that in the former, ordinary dialogue is merely spoken, whereas in operas, everything is sung relentlessly, even if it is just a husband asking his wife, "What's for dinner?" There are a couple of real songs in the movie, but by the time it got to them, I was a little worn out from all the singing that preceded.Finally, the story promises to be a cliché. Guy and Geneviève want to get married. However, he is drafted to fight the war in Algeria. On his last night before leaving, they make love. And you know what that means. When a woman in a movie has sex with a man just once, she gets pregnant. We then figure that either Guy will forget about her and fall in love with someone else, or he will be killed in the war. Either that, or she will be so desperate about covering up the shame of her pregnancy that she will marry someone else.Much to my amazement, I actually became engrossed in this movie, especially when the story went against my expectations. After only four months, Geneviève starts to forget about Guy. She says it feels as though he has been gone for years, and that she is losing the feeling she had for him. She has to look at his picture to remember what he looks like. It is true that she has only received one letter from him in four months, but you have to figure that a man fighting a war might not have the luxury of writing regularly (in fact, he is wounded by a grenade).And so she ends up marrying another man. The movie could have given her the standard motive of a woman desperate to cover up the shame of her pregnancy, but it does not. Neither she nor her mother seems unduly concerned about the matter. And in the one letter she receives from Guy, he writes that he is looking forward to coming home after his military service is over, marrying her, and seeing their child. It is unlikely that she would have married the other man had she not been pregnant, but we still get the sense that her decision to opt for a marriage of convenience was made possible by the brute fact that her love for Guy had faded.Before Guy and Geneviève separate, they sing the song we in America are familiar with as "I Will Wait for You." The lyrics in the movie are a bit different, but the thrust is the same. The two lovers express their undying love for each other. It reminds me of the movie "Oliver" (1968), in which Nancy sings the song "As Long as He Needs Me," referring to her lover Bill, who has no need for her at all, and ends up murdering her. We have a similar irony with the song "I Will Wait for You." Although the lyrics in the American version of the song say, "If it takes forever, I will wait for you," Geneviève does not even manage to wait more than four months. But the movie does not condemn her. It merely states the cold truth about love, that it creates an illusion that it will last forever, and then simply dissipates, despite our efforts to hold on to it.Guy eventually returns to find that Geneviève has married another man. Eventually, he marries too. When Guy and Geneviève finally meet again by accident, we see that they still have feelings for each other, but it is more a feeling of a love that was lost than of a love that still is.