Jacques Demy’s
The Young Girls of Rochefort is one of
the most joyously perfect of all musicals, one of the fullest realizations of
the genre’s capacity to transform the world and the people within it. The film’s
Rochefort is pure colour and light, a city where a spontaneous expression of
joy naturally transforms the environment around it into a choreographed dance,
where love at first sight is part of the daily conversation. It’s a gorgeously
expansive experience, but with an offsetting tension: three separate stories of
a man pining for an absent lover, in two of those cases not even aware he and she are in the same city. Of course, such complications are the basic currency of
genre plotting, but in this case they carry an exquisite existential charge, of
a longing that becomes its own form of being, almost its own fulfilment. Demy already
hints here at the darkness that becomes more prominent in his later films,
working in a subplot about a brutal killer (although it’s not one of the film’s
most integrated elements) and hinting at a possibility of displaced incest; for
all his romanticism, he has no illusions about the transactional nature of so-called
love (note the opportunism with which two guys on the make tell two sisters
they’re in love with them, without even specifying which of the guys supposedly
loves which of the women), and although all three strands reach the inevitable
happy ending, two of them are barely emphasized, and the other, in one of Demy’s
deftest moves, takes place just after the end of the film. But overall, these
undertones serve only to accentuate the prevailing delight, communicated
through Michel Legrand’s peerless music, and by exquisite casting touched by
its own poignant mystery (Catherine Deneuve at the start of one of the greatest
careers in cinema; her sister Francoise Dorleac already near the sudden end of her career, and of everything).
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