People only die of love in movies.
Fifty years after its release, I'm sure there's little I can say about Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that hasn't already been written countless times over. A film of exquisite beauty and unexpected melancholy, it depicts how a young couple, flush with first love and eager to get married, is split up and kept apart by circumstances far beyond their control. For starters, 17-year-old Geneviève (the radiant Catherine Deneuve) may be head over heels, but her mother (Anne Vernon) strongly disapproves of the match on the grounds that she's far too young to be thinking about marriage. As for her would-be husband, 20-year-old mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), he's drafted into the army and shipped off to fight in Algeria, but before he leaves they spend one last night together and at their teary farewell the next day she promises to wait for him. This proves difficult, though, when she becomes pregnant and is left with few options.
As melodramatic as all this sounds, it's transformed by Demy's clever conceit of having every single line of dialogue sung, with Michel Legrand's lush score holding it all aloft. Even relatively minor characters like Guy's ailing aunt (Mireille Perrey) and Madeleine (Ellen Farner), the girl who takes care of her, are able to express their deep feelings for him thanks to the combination of Demy's staging and Legrand's music. And diamond dealer Roland (Marc Michel), a character we're inclined to dislike because he effectively steals Geneviève away from Guy, is rendered sympathetic when he sings of his own lost love, Lola. One can't help but share the twinge of regret that passes between Guy and Geneviève, though, when they meet by pure chance six years after they were parted. Much as they would like to, there's no turning back the clock at that point.