Movie · 1964 · Drama, Romance · 1h 33m · PG-13 · French
Curator score: 9.2/10 (228.8K ratings)
A film for all the young lovers of the world.
Overview
This simple romantic tragedy begins in 1957. Guy Foucher, a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Geneviève Emery, an employee in her widowed mother's chic but financially embattled umbrella shop. On the evening before Guy is to leave for a two-year tour of combat in Algeria, he and Geneviève make love. She becomes pregnant and must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant.
Ratings
Curator score: 9.2/10
IMDb: 7.8/10
Letterboxd: 4.14/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%
Metacritic: 86
TMDB: 7.4/10
Director
Jacques Demy
Production
Parc Film, Madeleine Films, Beta Film
Cast
Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Mireille Perrey, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Jean Champion, Jean-Pierre Dorat, Harald Wolff, Pierre Caden, Bernard Fradet, Michel Benoist, Philippe Dumat, Dorothée Blanck, Jane Carat, Danielle Licari, José Bartel, Christiane Legrand, Georges Blaness, Claudine Meunier
Where to watch
Max
Curator Review
Verdict
A ravishing, fully sung romantic tragedy that turns everyday heartbreak into something operatic and unforgettable. Its candy-colored surfaces, emotional directness, and devastating final movement make it one of the great cinema romances.
Best for
Viewers who like tragic romances with a strong emotional payoff
Fans of bold visual style and color design
People open to musicals that feel more like drama than spectacle
Anyone interested in French New Wave-adjacent cinema with a distinctive formal experiment
Skip if
You need naturalistic dialogue and conventional realism
You dislike musicals or sung-through storytelling
You want a light, uplifting romance with a happy ending
You prefer plot-heavy films over mood, style, and emotional atmosphere
Overview
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of cinema’s most distinctive love stories: every line is sung, yet the film feels less like a musical than a heartbreak rendered in color. Jacques Demy uses pastel streets, shopfronts, and costumes to create a world that looks buoyant even as it moves toward quiet devastation.
Worth noting
What makes it endure is the way it treats ordinary choices as life-altering. Love, duty, money, and time all press in on the characters, and the film never cheats its sadness. The emotional logic is simple, but the form makes it feel heightened, elegant, and strangely inevitable.
Bottom line
It is especially powerful for viewers who respond to visual beauty as a carrier of feeling. The ending lands with a force that has echoed through later romances for decades, but the film’s own voice remains singular: tender, melancholy, and devastatingly precise.
Top Letterboxd reviews
amanda :( · 11671 likes
romanticizing leaving my child in a freezing car as i gain closure with an estranged lover
harley (5★) · 9645 likes
I was waiting for them to stop singing but they never did
Nick (5★) · 6029 likes
If La La Land made you cry, then The Umbrellas of Cherbourg will literally kill you.
Josh Lewis (5★) · 5537 likes
"I would’ve died for him, so why aren’t I dead?”
😭😭😭
Sara Clements (4★) · 4538 likes
You: Wes Anderson's colour palette
Me, an intellectual: Jacques Demy's colour palette