“I wanted to make people cry. […] And I succeeded! I was pleased.” This is how Jacques Demy describes his Palme d’Or-winning movie musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in a making-of documentary interview he gave to the BBC in 1972. Pleased he must have been indeed, as the film enjoyed huge critical and public success, with a whopping 1.2 million box-office issions in and five Oscar nominations overseas—a double triumph that many of his peers from the French New Wave movement, with which he was especially associated through his 1961 debut feature Lola, had not been granted.

At first glance, the story is one we all know too well: a young woman and man fall in love, promise to be with each other until the end; but then life happens, and they both marry someone else. An umbrella vendor’s daughter, Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve, only twenty-years-old at the time of filming), and her gas station worker sweetheart, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), certainly fit the mold of ill-fated young lovers—but Demy’s film covers far more ground than that. Behind the bittersweet love songs and bright colors exists a modern, class-conscious narrative, with the Algerian War casting its shadow across it.

More than 60 years after its release, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg remains an unclassifiable marvel of cinema. From thematic and rather off-the-mark homages (crawled, walked, or ran, one thing is certain: it wouldn’t have existed without The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Jacques Demy and his lifelong collaborator Michel Legrand (who also penned soundtracks for Agnès Varda’s The Thomas Crown Affair) crafted this film to be “en chanté”: a French play on words referring equally to being “enchanting” and “sung throughout” its entirety. As Jaime puts it in their Letterboxd review: “Those who want a musical like any other musical will not find it in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” No extravagant dance numbers, no sudden bursts into song—this is a movie that breathes through its music, every note a pulse, every word recited affirming its raison d’être. If there is choreography to speak of, it is that of the music itself: actors and cameras move in step and time with the pre-recorded lyrics.

The bold artistic decision brought The Umbrellas of Cherbourg its fair share of critics—though, judging by their respective ratings on Letterboxd, the ire for Cherbourg seems to have faded as it sits at a 4.1 average, whereas Annette currently holds a 3.4. While the phrase is never uttered in the film, French audiences would teasingly sing “ me the salt” while Cherbourg was in theaters, poking fun at the way the movie turned even the most banal, everyday exchanges like “I’m hungry” or “See you tomorrow” into melodies. In an interview featured in Criterion’s 4K digital restoration, a French TV reporter questions the filmmaker: “Why ask people to sing when they have no reason to? Do you see people singing ‘I’d like the apple pie’ in a restaurant?” Demy, ever charming, responds, “Why not? It would make life more pleasant!”

As Jim Ridley aptly explains in his Criterion essay, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the conventions of Hollywood musicals serve Demy to “convey what’s left when the illusions fade.” A seventeen-year-old girl who gets pregnant just as her lover is drafted to war in Algeria and ends up marrying a rich, older man? And the boyfriend, now a limping war veteran, only learning of this upon his return? That’s definitely not entertainment!

No doubt why They aren’t films; they are experiences. Despite its aesthetic artificiality, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg offers a remarkably sober depiction of romantic love: its sincerity as well as its fragility, when faced with the social and moral structures of small-town life in 1960s . Some might see it as a cautionary tale, but neither Geneviève’s mother, Madame Emery, who discourages her daughter from marrying Guy, nor Roland Cassard, the diamond dealer who asks for Geneviève’s hand, are portrayed as villains. (The bourgeoisie and the war are, though—but we’ll come to that later.)

Geneviève truly believes it when she sings, “I could never live without you,” to Guy (the love theme in question, later covered by Connie Francis, Frank Sinatra, Cher, Liza Minnelli and more.) Months , and she is left alone with her worries, consoled only by occasional, laconic letters from Guy—which comfort her less and less, gradually replaced by her mother’s anxious glances and Roland’s looming proposal. So when the doubt begins to take hold, her disbelief and surprise in her exclamation, “I would have died for him. Why am I not dead?” feel all the more genuine. Meanwhile, Guy, who briefly succumbs to bitterness upon his return, moves on as well—committing himself to Madeleine (Ellen Farner), his Aunt Elise’s (Mireille Perrey) caretaker who has silently loved him all this time—and achieving his dreams of becoming a gas station owner.

But despite Chazelle referring to it as a “crypto-remake,” not everyone is convinced. “La La Land could never”, thinks Avalyn when reviewing Cherbourg; lo’s take is even harsher. In La La Land, Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a pianist who dreams of opening his own jazz club, end up separating in order to pursue their ambitions, despite the mutual promise (“I’m always gonna love you”) they make to each other. By contrast, the star-crossed lovers of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg submit to the logic of internalized social determinism—something the individualistic, career-driven protagonists of La La Land would not recognize.

Geneviève marrying Roland instead of Guy (seemingly her own choice) is fundamentally motivated by the division between the bourgeoisie and the working class, imposed on a young single mother. It is this determinism that renders the ending of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg more tragic and solemn than Chazelle’s picture. While La La Land offers a chance to imagine a “what if?” scenario, in which Mia’s and Sebastian’s paths cross years later, Guy and Geneviève are totally deprived of it: there is no reality in which they could have ended up together.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is championed by several filmmakers in its home country, as well—starting with Christophe Honoré, who idolizes Jacques Demy as his “imaginary godfather,” and whose movies Love Songs and Beloved both feature deliberate references to Demy’s masterpiece. Love Songs follows the same three-part narrative structure as Cherbourg—the departure, the absence, and the return. In the film’s opening sequence, Ludivine Sagnier’s character, Julie, sports the same hairstyle as Geneviève, while in another scene, Chiara Mastroianni’s Jeanne is seen wearing a cardboard crown (a French tradition for Epiphany celebrations) just as her mother did 43 years earlier. In Beloved, which stars both Mastroianni and Deneuve, Honoré has Deneuve’s character, Madeleine, sing, in an indirect response to Geneviève: “I can live without you. What kills me, my love, is that I can’t live without loving you.”

Similarly, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s underseen Jeanne and the Perfect Guy pays an intentional tribute to Demy and his narrative universe. In this film, too, a young man (Olivier) and a young woman (Jeanne) fall in love, believing it to be their happily ever after. However, their love is undone not by war but by Olivier’s illness—he has AIDS, the same disease that took Jacques Demy’s life in 1990. Fittingly, Olivier is played by none other than Mathieu Demy, the son of Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda.

A dark chapter in ’s history, the war is glimpsed mainly through letters that Guy sends to Geneviève from the front lines. “It’s strange how the sun and death travel together,” writes Guy, who returns from the trenches a bitter, broken man. While Geneviève’s tragedy often takes center stage in viewers’ memories, Guy’s wounded psyche is depicted with genuine sincerity and comion.

While her films don’t straightforwardly cite The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Céline Sciamma considers it a decisive influence on her education as a cinephile—Petite Maman, for instance, exude the Demy magic in question.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the artistic direction of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg inspired Greta Gerwig’s her official Letterboxd Barbie watchlist, Gerwig called Cherbourg “an amazing movie and astonishingly beautiful. I loved the use of color and the surrealness.” Gerwig is known to be a through-and-through cinephile, and her homage to Demy goes far beyond Stereotypical Barbie’s hairdo à la Geneviève. The role that color plays in the director’s world-building traces a creative lineage that unmistakably extends to the French filmmaker’s chromatic expressivity.

Take, for instance, the two dominant colors in the depiction of Barbieland. While the countless shades of pink clearly lead the palette, the interplay and contrast with blue go beyond a simple man-woman binary. Bright, azure and cyan-like blues recur in the daytime sky and the sea; in the campfire scenes, the navy and deep marine tones of the night sky frame the characters’ softly illuminated faces, extending the picturesque tension. And in the dance sequences, pinks and blues alternately merge and separate, eventually giving way to lilacs: Gerwig, like Demy, forgoes overt symbolism in favor of shaping color into mood and atmosphere.

But even in its most lucid moments, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg never doubts the sincerity of love—weaving together all its chagrins and joys, and keeping it safe like a precious token. So much so that, decades later, the bittersweet melodies that sing the short-lived romance between Geneviève and Guy still strike an emotional chord in the hearts of audiences, including our Letterboxd community. “People only die of love in the movies”—the film’s most quoted line—often proves to be true, since cinema, as a time-tested tool for sentimental education, teaches us how to live through loss and carry it into the future.