So Filmstruck’s genre tags on this one are “Musical, Romance” and both of those are true but also not so much. (I’m going to spoil this, so if you’d prefer to watch it on your own, go do that first. It’s good.)

On the “musical” front, that’s probably the right word for it, but “opera” almost feels more appropriate. Because it’s not that they randomly burst into song every now and then, it’s that every word in the movie is sung. It actually feels somewhat less artificial than setpiece musicals, because there isn’t that moment when they break out of normalcy and have a song-and-dance routine, they’re just kind of speaking in a particularly affected way all the time.

As for “romance,” it certainly is that at first: A young girl of 17 is in love with a young man of 21, and they want to get married but her mother forbids her… but very shortly, that becomes irrelevant, as he’s called up to the war in Algeria[1] and will be gone for two years. Weeping, wailing, a last passionate night together, and promises that they will both love each other forever and always and meet again on the other side of the war, in grand romantic tradition.

But you’re thinking, okay, right, that’s fine for movies, but 17-year-olds are not really known for their promises of lifelong love being super-believable, especially when one of them is going away for years. And the movie hears you: Letters are infrequent, she starts feeling like maybe he’s forgetting about her, and then an extra wrinkle pops up: She’s pregnant with his baby, from their night together before he left for the war.

And now another young man[2] enters the picture, one who is struck by her beauty, and who is (unlike the dude off in the army) wealthy and successful, and who tldr wants to marry her. And eventually she lets him know that hey, she’s pregnant, so are you sure about that? And he actually is, so she’s all okay then, let’s do this, and they’re married.

Later, the other dude comes home from the war, and — partly because he’s lost this girl, but also partly because of what today would be recognized as PTSD — he ends up losing his job, getting into a rough place, and what-not. But his aunt’s nurse, who was clearly nursing an unrequited crush on him earlier in the movie, now gets that crush requited, and his love for her ends up getting him out of his funk, and he ultimately settles down with her and ends up owning a gas station and having kids and generally being happy and prosperous.

And so the first third of the movie was the romance between the guy and the girl; the second third was the girl finding her life without him; and the last third was him finding his life without her, which is not a classical romance structure as such. And then there’s the last scene of the movie, where the girl (older now, and with her — their — child) stops by chance at the gas station he owns, and they recognize each other and with very few words have a scene that is poignant with might-have-beens, but also puts the close on the half-remembered idea of their lives together.

It’s a sweet movie, with depth to its characters that goes beyond stock romance roles; the story is unpredictable and engaging; and it’s visually stunning — it’s one of those color movies that uses the fuck out of its color: Every interior in the movie is painted or wallpapered with bright, bold colors, and clothing often matches. (The movie actually had a big restoration done in 1998 — it was completed by Agnès Varda, who was Demy’s wife — and looks quite restored.)

Good stuff, recommended.

  1. (Which was kind of a callback to The Battle of Algiers for me, in the same way that naval officers appearing in Regency romances always make me think of Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian.) ↩︎

  2. (Who, it turns out, is actually from an earlier movie by Jacques Demy. Demy created a sort of shared-world in his films, and would do things like this, have characters from one movie show up in another. It’s like the Marvel Universe except with rather fewer superpowers.) ↩︎