the umbrellas of cherbourg

Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) is in love with car mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), but her mother (Anne Vernon) has other ideas. Her umbrella shop isn’t doing well; besides, there’s the war in Algeria... In Demy’s bittersweet classic Michel Legrand’s achingly lovely score, the vibrant colour-coding of Bernard Evein’s art direction, Jean Rabier’s elegant, fluid camerawork and the uniformly rhapsodic performances are brought together to turn an unusually sombre – even dark – storyline into an enchanting fairy tale that muses wisely, and very movingly, on the workings of chance and fate.