“I would have died for him. So why aren’t I dead?”
Latent with visual melancholy, the sweeping gestures of romance and despair are fraught with a fragility that beckons our attention. The tender sincerity lingers far after the end credits, and the taste of wistful remorse, of finality, has the impact of a wound. The longing that frames the film and cusps its denouement feels like an exposed nerve that heals over, but never fully.
The candy color facades and lyrical dialogue can hardly conceal the earnestness of love and the wrench of loss. Seasons change and bring along the requisite adjustments to life, and so to does the heart change, expanding and contracting with the toll of mourning, anticipating, and accepting. Emotions allow us the chance to mediate our desires, and offer the possibility of metamorphosis.
Though some have discarded it as studiously sentimental, I have always found that there is a healthy reservoir of ambiguity, a repository of things left unsaid that provide a compelling counterweight to the saccharine musicality that is also integral to the film. The artificial conventions of the musical genre may strike the audience as overwrought and perhaps woefully sentimental, but upon further inspection, there is still a tangible veil of realism that can be massaged out of the lyrics and the melodrama.
All Images Owned by: The Criterion Collection. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964, The Criterion Collection. Images screen stills taken by author.
