Original Title: Les Damoiselles de Rochefort
Director: Jacques Demy / Year: 1967 / Color / French language / English subtitles / MPA rating: G / Runtime: 125 min
“THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT,” a musical that [plays Thursday as this season’s NewScreen finale], is another of those strange, off-beat movies produced by Mag Bodard in which a conventional, gay form is structured over what would be, in its terms, a catastrophe. In “Le Bonheur,” it was a happy young marriage in which the husband’s happiness was immeasurably increased by his wife’s suicide. In “Benjamin,” it was a seduction of innocents, in which the girl slept with the right man all right, but fell and stayed in love with an aging roué.In “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” directed by Jacques Demy, who directed “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” — also produced by Miss Bodard — a musical takes place in a town where soldiers continuously march, where the headlines are bleaker every day, and where a sadistic killer is part of the happy cast. It has again that air of a fleecy inferno or a frosted concentration camp.The movie has the sisters Catherine Deneuve and the late Françoise Dorleac, playing twins who run a ballet school in Rochefort and who dream of meeting their ideal men; Gene Kelly and Jacques Perrin, as men in Rochefort who dream of meeting their ideal girls; Danielle Darrieux, as the girls’ unmarried mother, who dreams of meeting again the love of her youth (whom she did not marry because his name was Monsieur Dame), and Michel Piccoli, who dreams of meeting the love of his youth (who did not marry him on account of his name). There are many strange songs, and dances and contretemps.Some of the best dancing, again, is by Grover Dale, in a minor part; even his hair joins in the general elegance with which he moves. There is a lot of witty, high elegant and absurdist dialogue and some terrible puns. The movie is in French (in which Kelly does admirably), but the subtitles, in an attractive kind of lettering, are discreet and excellent. The music, by Michel Legrand, is sometimes funny, sometimes undistinguished, and sometimes just lovely.There are always those soldiers and that sadistic killer, of course, which give the whole movie a fine, eccentric, pastel and dreamlike irony. The cast is extremely solid and alive, and “The Young Girls of Rochefort” is certainly the best musical in some time.
Review by Renata Adler for The New York Times
