The Young Girls of Rochefort

Summary: 5/10: gorgeous to look at and blessed with Gene Kelly's still-limber dancing, but weighed down by a predictable script and forgettable songs that haven't aged nearly as gracefully as the restoration that preserves them

Jacques Demy's follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg arrives dressed in Criterion's admirable 2K restoration, with colors so vivid they practically hum. Production designer Bernard Evein reportedly repainted forty thousand square meters of the actual town to achieve this candy-colored fantasy, and the effort shows; every frame looks like a postcard from an idealized France that never quite existed.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that the film beneath the surface hasn't aged well. The story, following twin sisters Delphine and Solange (real-life siblings Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac) as they dream of escaping their provincial port town, unfolds with a predictability that curdles into tedium well before the two-hour runtime concludes. Demy's script telegraphs its romantic coincidences so far in advance that watching the characters arrive at conclusions we reached scenes earlier becomes an exercise in patience rather than pleasure.

Michel Legrand's score, despite the composer's evident craft and his celebrated collaboration with Demy, produces nothing that lingers. The songs function adequately as connective tissue between dance numbers, but not one melody stays with you after the credits roll, a real problem for a film built entirely around its music.

What does work, and works considerably, is the physical performance. Gene Kelly, playing American composer Andy Miller, brings his signature rubbery-legged athleticism to a role that doesn't ask much of him dramatically but gives him ample room to move. Kelly was fifty-five when he made this film, and watching him dance through French streets with that effortless elasticity still intact, undiminished by age, offers the film's most purely pleasurable moment...