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 and still remains utterly French. The songs are by Demy's regular collaborator Michel Legrand, whose score earned an Academy Award nomination.

Catherine Deneuve and her real-life sister Françoise Dorléac play the twin sisters longing for romance and escape, with the 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. It is a film of almost defiant joy, and its melancholy undertow of missed connections is all the more poignant for the brightness around it.

Tragedy shadows the film off screen. Dorléac died in a car accident shortly after its release, and the sisters' radiance now carries a retrospective ache. Film-makers have loved it ever since, from Damien Chazelle, whose La La Land openly draws on it, to a host of musical revivalists. Restored in vivid colour and championed by a new generation, it is one of the most purely pleasurable films in French cinema and one of the most joyous and influential musicals ever made, a sun-drenched celebration of chance, of romance and of the movies themselves.