A radiant, expertly crafted musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort is both escapist delight and emotionally astute cinema. Demy’s film remains a high-water mark for the form: a sunny, bittersweet celebration of the small wonders that push people toward love.
In an era of cynical reboots and grey superhero blockbusters, feels like a revolutionary act. It insists that beauty is not frivolous, that melody is not escapism, and that a twin sister’s smile is worth capturing in the highest possible definition. The Young Girls of Rochefort -1967- Criterion -...
Released in 1967, this film is the sunlit counterweight to Demy’s own heartbreaking The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). While Umbrellas used sung-through dialogue to explore the tragedy of lost love, Rochefort explodes onto the screen with the vibrancy of a freshly opened box of crayons. For decades, accessing this masterpiece in its full, intended glory was a challenge. That changed definitively with the release of edition. A radiant, expertly crafted musical, The Young Girls
In the pantheon of movie musicals, there are the stone-cold classics of the Golden Age ( Singin’ in the Rain ), the gritty rock operas of the 1970s ( Tommy ), and then—suspended in a bubble of pure, phosphorescent joy—there is Jacques Demy’s ( Les Demoiselles de Rochefort ). It insists that beauty is not frivolous, that
: A 2014 discussion between Demy biographer Jean-Pierre Berthomé and costume designer Jacqueline Moreau.