Jacques Demy

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The angelically beautiful Catherine Deneuve was launched to stardom by this dazzling musical heart-tugger from Jacques Demy. She plays an umbrella-shop owner’s delicate daughter, glowing with first love for a handsome garage mechanic, played by Nino Castelnuovo. When the boy is shipped off to fight in Algeria, the two lovers must grow up quickly. Exquisitely designed in a kaleidoscope of colors, and told entirely through lilting songs by the great composer Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most revered and unorthodox movie musicals of all time.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1964
  • 92 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • French
  • Spine #716

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Once Upon a Time . . . “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a 2008 documentary
  • Interview from 2014 with film scholar Rodney Hill
  • French television interview from 1964 featuring director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand discussing the film
  • Audio recordings of interviews with actor Catherine Deneuve (1983) and Legrand (1991) at the National Film Theatre in London
  • Restoration demonstration
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Jim Ridley

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

The Essential Jacques Demy

The Essential Jacques Demy

Blu-ray Box Set

6 Discs

$99.96

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Once Upon a Time . . . “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a 2008 documentary
  • Interview from 2014 with film scholar Rodney Hill
  • French television interview from 1964 featuring director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand discussing the film
  • Audio recordings of interviews with actor Catherine Deneuve (1983) and Legrand (1991) at the National Film Theatre in London
  • Restoration demonstration
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Jim Ridley
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Cast
Catherine Deneuve
Geneviève Emery
Nino Castelnuovo
Guy Foucher
Anne Vernon
Madame Emery
Marc Michel
Roland Cassard
Ellen Farner
Madeleine
Mireille Perrey
Aunt Élise
Credits
Director
Jacques Demy
Written by
Jacques Demy
Original music by
Michel Legrand
Cinematographer
Jean Rabier
Production designer
Bernard Evein
Costume designer
Jacqueline Moreau
Editors
Monique Teisseire
Editors
Anne-Marie Cotret
Producer
Mag Bodard

Current

Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand: Partners in Song
Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand: Partners in Song

In this 1964 television interview, Jacques Demy defends his use of wall-to-wall singing and Michel Legrand takes to the piano for a few bars from one of his most famous compositions.

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment

A friend and longtime scholar of Jacques Demy ruminates on the great director’s career, as well as the port hometown they shared—which would become a magical movie location.

By Jean-Pierre Berthomé

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: A Finite Forever
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: A Finite Forever

Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.

By Jim Ridley

Demy Monde
Demy Monde
Film scholar James Quandt created a nearly hour-long visual essay for our new collector’s set The Essential Jacques Demy. Titled Jacques Demy, A to Z, it elaborates on twenty-six concepts important to understanding the cinema of this singular filmm…
Restoring The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Restoration Spotlight

Restoring The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The following short program, which also appears as a supplement in our new box set The Essential Jacques Demy, gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the painstaking 2013 digital restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which brought the…
Davy Chou’s Top 10
Davy Chou’s Top 10

The director of Return to Seoul expresses what he values most in cinema through this selection of ten favorite films.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top 10
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top 10

The Nobel Prize–winning novelist shares a list of films that illuminate his artistic sensibility, including one British classic that inspired him to write his masterpiece The Remains of the Day.

Explore

Catherine Deneuve

Actor

Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve

One of cinema’s great beauties, Catherine Deneuve (born Catherine Dorléac in Paris in 1943) is also an icon of the transformative cinematic 1960s. The daughter of two actors and the sister of three (one of whom, Françoise Dorléac, died in a car crash in 1967), Deneuve has acting in her blood. After her major breakthrough in Jacques Demy’s poignant 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Deneuve continued to prove she was more than just a pretty face in Roman Polanski’s thriller Repulsion and Luis Buñuel’s surreal erotic daydream Belle de jour. Those films may exploit Deneuve’s crystalline loveliness for its seeming inscrutability, but her portrayals of sexual repression in both (and her shocking embodiment of schizophrenia in the former) make for two of the most vivid performances of the era. Those roles set her on the path to becoming a full-fledged movie star, and she went on to act for François Truffaut, Alain Cavalier, Marco Ferreri, and Jean-Pierre Melville. Her performances have grown richer as she’s aged; today, she is a true grand dame of the cinema, and her compellingly enigmatic looks—once interpreted as fragile—have taken on a mature imperiousness, as evidenced in such films as Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (in which she costars with her daughter with Marcello Mastroianni, Chiara Mastroianni).