A swarm of sunny Technicolor and balletic sublimity, Jacques Demy’s 1967 musical The Young Girls of Rochefort must be the chicest of all comedies of errors. Here, a port town in south-western France becomes a cosmic diorama of dreamers, who crisscross one another in pursuit of love, destiny and freedom.
At the film’s centre are the headfast twins, composer Solange and dance teacher Delphine, played by real-life sisters Françoise Dorléac and Catherine Deneuve. Complete with matching silk nightgowns in complementary hues, they rhapsodise about a future of boundless success in Paris. Desires come to a head with the libidinous influence of a travelling fete and, as the camera drifts through Rochefort like a sea breeze, the lovesick cast only expands. At some point it picks up Gene Kelly, who emotes with an earnestness that teeters, thrillingly, on the border of cheese.
A pastel reverie that could easily be called a family movie, The Young Girls feels like somewhat of an outlier for the French director, whose luscious films often churn with despair or perversity. Upon its release, Demy had already directed Deneuve in the melancholic Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), as a cherubic teenage shopgirl pregnant to her conscripted beau. Later, in his 1970 fairytale Donkey Skin, Demy would also cast Deneuve as a princess who, at risk of being confined to an incestuous marriage, is forced to take on the disguise of a mule’s carcass.
The Young Girls is a deeply pleasurable movie about pleasure. “For Les Demoiselles,” Demy once said in an interview, “I wanted above all to provide two hours of joy.” Set to twinkling jazz, dancers flutter in fitted lamé trousers or bouncy tennis skirts as children float toy boats in nearby fountains. Waylaying the obsessive synchronicity of the Hollywood chorus line, the choreography has a scattered, rippling effect, as if bodies are responding to each other in dialogue. Meanwhile, the opera’s lyrics – pun-packed and loosely rhymed – send their singers into an endearing breathlessness.
Nevertheless, as in Cherbourg or Donkey Skin, there’s also an undercurrent of desperation in The Young Girls. Love proves to be as pathetic as it is glamorous. There’s the plight of Michel Piccoli’s kind-eyed Simon Dame, rejected by his fiancee because of his last name (which would doom her to become Madame Dame). In a surreal plot strand, a sailor called Maxence goes awol every night to work in his studio, where he has recently painted his “feminine ideal” – a perfect double of Delphine, although he has never seen her. As his search becomes ever-more circular, Maxence’s idealism is at once satirised and celebrated. He may be a clown, but he is also, as in the Shakespearean tradition, a kind of oracle.
In Demy’s world of mistakes and missed opportunities, romance is both an absurdity and a matter of incomparable seriousness: the axis on which fantasy, and life, turns. Instead of straining to hide the flimsy boundary between madness and longing, Demy exploits it with hypnotic enthusiasm and an enchanting atmosphere of dazed, delayed unity.
Demy’s escapism is ruptured, however, as we watch rows of soldiers march mechanically past the village’s languorous locals and sorbet-coloured facades. It is notable that The Young Girls was filmed in the immediate wake of the Algerian war and, in the film, Rochefort is home to a French naval base from which Maxence, always wearing his hauntingly white uniform, itches to escape. In moments like these we’re reminded that ports are not only sites of leisurely daydreams but of militarism, uncertainty and violent exchange.
This doesn’t blot out the utopian glee of Demy’s troupe, however, whose naivety is imbued with knowing. Singing and dancing while being unloaded from a ferry – or scouring cobblestone streets for a figment of one’s imagination – may seem like artificial pastimes, but they are no more so than regiment or labour. When asked about the importance of cinema, Demy’s answer was simple: it fuelled his “desire to live and to go on living”. For Demy, life is about choosing which delusions to indulge and, in Rochefort, love and poetry are tantamount to breath.
The Young Girls of Rochefort is streaming on SBS On Demand. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
