Guy works as a mechanic, and lives with his bedridden aunt Élise (Mireille Perrey) and her devoted and attractive servant Madeleine (Ellen Farner). Geneviéve lives with her beautiful forty-ish mother Madame (Anne Vernon), and both work as saleswomen at Madame's small shop that sells nothing but umbrellas.
Geneviéve and Guy are mired in deep romantic love. But, of course, their relationship has major obstacles to overcome. Madame, naturally, believes that hottie Geneviéve can make a better match than grease monkey Guy. Worse, Guy is drafted, and sent to Algeria, where the French are despised and engaged in an endless military occupation.
Geneviéve is devastated, at first. But, as Madame suspected, her love for the absent Guy gradually wanes into mere depression. Geneviéve is also pregnant from her final days with Guy. Although the prospect looms that Geneviéve will deliver a scandalous and illegitimate child, family hope arrives in Roland (Marc Michel), a wealthy, handsome, and unceasingly nice jewelry merchant.
Roland has already saved Madame from financial ruin by making a generous offer on her pearls. Roland is taken with Geneviéve, and sees her pregnancy by another man as simply providing him with a greater opportunity to win her hand when she is most vulnerable. They wed and move to Paris.
Guy returns from military service with a limp from shrapnel. He learns that Geneviéve has married, then his beloved aunt dies. Guy falls into a severe funk. But Madeleine, who has always carried a torch for Guy, pulls him out of it. They marry, and Guy purchases a gas station via his aunt's estate.
Now it is December 1963. The now wealthy Geneviéve pays a visit to Guy's station, accompanied by their toddler daughter. Guy invites her to his office, where they politely and blandly converse. Geneviéve departs, and Madeleine returns from (shopping?) with their toddler son. The romantic music swells.
How others will see it. The significance of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was recognized immediately. It won the Golden Palm at Cannes, and picked up five Oscar nominations, unusual for a foreign language film.
At imdb.com, the movie has a respectable 12K user votes and a high user rating of 7.8. The ratings are surprisingly consistent across all demographics, but men grade it slightly higher, likely due to the bittersweet ending.
How I felt about it. The novel aspect of the film is that all the dialogue is sung. This is surprisingly effective, as it eliminates the margins between speech and song that can make musicals seem artificial.
This is a lovely film to locate. The brightly colored sets, the beautiful cast, the exemplary, sumptuous, and overwhelming Michel Legrand score, and the world-class script and direction combine to place The Umbrellas of Cherbourg among the best French films of all time. Although it has stiff competition from Children of Paradise, the marathon drama filmed during World War II but set during the early 19th century.
Although Umbrellas is one of the saddest movies ever, up there with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) and the notorious Something About Amelia, it technically has happy endings for its leads. Geneviéve marries a handsome, wealthy, and ingratiating young man. Guy has Madeleine, a better person than the somewhat sullen Geneviéve could ever hope to be. Geneviéve doesn't even have to decency to write Guy a Dear John letter. She simply stops replying to his letters from Algieria.
But the ending is very sad nonetheless, because the great love between Guy and Geneviéve is cut off at its apex. It seems that Madame loves Roland more than does Geneviéve, and Guy marries Madeleine because she is hanging fruit at a time when he is at rock bottom. The same analogy is valid for Geneviéve.
In the end, she has more money than Guy, but Guy is nonetheless better off because his beloved spouse is ever-present, while Geneviéve has only her preschool daughter while her globe-trotting husband builds his fortune.