Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 January 06 • Monday

While my first reaction to a 4k restoration of a movie screening at the Film Forum is usually to grumble that the screens there are on the small side and I can watch 4k and make much better popcorn at home, both times I attended such a showing at the Film Forum in 2024 were quite rewarding.

The second of these was The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and it was absolutely worth seeing in the theatre for full immersion. It was also, for me, radicalizing in a very specific way. I walked out grimly determined to tell the world that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is an opera, not a musical.

In fact, it appears to have been made as a complete reversal of Carmen, the opera that the main characters go to see very early in the film.

The difference between an opera and a musical is one of realities. An opera takes place in a reality where all words are sung and none are spoken. A musical alternates between our reality, where people go around talking and walking and not actually singing and dancing unless the singing and dancing are deliberate acts of singing as singing and dancing as dancing, and a reality where everyone starts singing and dancing as an unremarked substitute for talking and walking.

My knowledge of opera is minimal but it seems like there isn't a lot of dancing going on in it. Essentially the forms break down like this:
Play: talk
Opera: sing
Ballet: dance
Musical: all of the above

And so 2025 begins with Michel Legrand's inexhaustibly delightful and mindblowingly great music for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as the 837th Soundtrack of the Week.

The music is a tremendous achievement, accompanying every second of the film yet never flagging or trying too hard or becoming dull.

It's a delicious concoction of jazz and pop and orchestral music, effortlessly breezing from Serge Gainsbourg-ish melodies and grooves to intensely stirring passages of operatic intensity. Perhaps the use of jazz and pop language in combination with the movie's 90-minute running time is part of the reason The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is categorized as a musical.

There isn't much I can say about the music other than that for the last few weeks, since leaving the Film Forum, I've been listening to it, singing it, whistling it or just having it in my head.

This two-CD presentation of it is a must-have and also includes some good extras, particularly Legrand himself shredding the main theme as his piano trio romps through it in various genres.

Tony Bennett is also here with the English-language "Watch What Happens", an overblown arrangement that lacks the sprightliness and dazzle of the original.