The Young Girls of Rochefort Movie Review

Director Jacques Demy said that The Young Girls of Rochefort's plot wasn't of much consequence, and he's right. This is a film about music and color, an impressive follow-up to the similar The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which also starred Catherine Deneuve as a starry-eyed French girl with love in her heart. In Rochefort she has a twin sister (Françoise Dorléac, who died in a car accident at the age of 25, before Rochefort was ever released in the United States); together they're after a pair of eligible young men of Rochefort, at least when they aren't working on their professions -- one's a dancer, one's a pianist and composer. But really they're both singers, as this musical lurches through one musical dance number after another -- for a movie with no important plot, why must it run beyond two full hours? Ultimately it's a tepid storyline that makes Rochefort pale in the face of Cherbourg, which pretty much had it all. (And damn if these girls don't wear way too much makeup!)

Aka Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.