The Young Girls of Rochefort

Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is the exuberant companion to his earlier The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a Technicolor musical that pays open homage to the Hollywood golden age while remaining utterly French. With songs by Demy's regular collaborator Michel Legrand, it earned an Academy Award nomination for its score.

Catherine Deneuve and her real-life sister Françoise Dorléac play the twin sisters longing for romance and escape, with the genuine Hollywood star Gene Kelly and George Chakiris among the dancers who pass through town. Demy choreographs the whole of Rochefort into the number — pastel façades, a sunlit square, crowds breaking into synchronised movement — in a film of almost defiant joy, its melancholy undertow of missed connections all the more poignant for the brightness around it.

The film is shadowed by tragedy off screen, as Dorléac died in a car accident shortly after its release, lending the sisters' radiance a retrospective ache. Beloved by film-makers from Damien Chazelle, whose La La Land openly draws on it, to a host of musical revivalists, it endures as one of the most purely pleasurable films in French cinema — a sun-drenched ode to chance, romance and the movies themselves. Restored in vivid colour and championed by a new generation, it endures as one of the most joyous and influential musicals ever made.