I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Expected more

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Blistering performances.

From the same team that brought us The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy as director and LeGrand composing the score, is the equally delightful Young Girls of Rochefort. The costumes, sets, music and dance numbers are wonderful and joyful. The cast is solid enough, although the appearance of Gene Kelly did kind of throw me a bit, I guess for his considerable contributions to movie musicals was he included, although he was fine also. I didn't quite connect with Rochefort to the degree I did with Cherbourg, but still very much worth checking out.

Two beautiful girls and their lovely mother find singing, dancing, and love in the seaside town of Rochefort. Delphine falls for Maxence (the least convincing looking sailor since Popeye), Solange falls for Andy (Gene Kelly, who is more than twice the age of his paramour) and mother Yvonne finally yields to the man she jilted years ago (because he had a silly name). This romantic confection is delivered wrapped in exquisite colours, spontaneous dancing, and pretty, if not memorable, music. The film has some odd touches: for some reason, a gruesome murder is rolled into the plot, allowing for a little black humour and for a while all of the conversation seems to be in rhyming couplets (or at least the subtitles were). Most of the lead's singing voices were dubbed in (sometimes not particularly well) but I was quite impressed by the rhyming song subtitles (clever, albeit not always accurate, translations). Overall, a fun, colourful and very French musical (although not nearly as French as Remy's great 1964 musical "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg"). A sad footnote: Françoise Dorléac, Catherine Deneuve's actual sister who played her twin sister in this film, was killed in a car accident shortly after this film was released in Europe.

"Les Demoiselles de Rochefort" may be Jacques Demy's most frivolous film but it's also a masterpiece; a musical that owes almost everything to Minnelli, not to mention Donen and Kelly as well as Demy himself with touches of both "Lola" and "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" very much to the fore. It also has one of the great scores, (by Michel Legrand), of any musical with lyrics by Demy himself and a cast headed by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac, American musical stars George Chakiris, Grover Dale and Gene Kelly himself, as well as Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli and Jacques Perrin. The plot is lighter than a soufflé and Ghislain Cloquet's cinematography, positively ravishing. It isn't as well known as "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" but it's certainly it's equal. I think it's one of the greatest musicals ever made.

I honestly don't know how to rate this film. The plot is idiotic beyond description, the dialog demented, the lovely Catherine Deneuve looks like she's had her make-up done by a mortician's intern, and the film's hero looks like a gay wet dream, complete with sailor-boy outfit and bleached hair. As a cinematic whole, the film comes across as the results of Prozac abuse and a lobotomy.And yet, somehow, what you bring away from the film seems to be the two strokes of genius - and no, I don't include Kelly's choreography, but Michel LeGrand's haunting tunes (and Chanson de Maxence, simple though it be, tops even "Windmills" in my mind) and the great and unexpected ending, which you'd never thought could have crossed the mind of the man that perpetrated the last two hours of cinematic delirium tremens."Demoiselles de Rochefort" runs parallel in my experience to "Song of Norway", almost three hours of heartless though unintended mockery of the classical composer Grieg, exacerbated by silly animated inserts, and yet "Norway" suddenly manages to introduce completely unexpected and effective tragedy at the very end. And of course, Grieg's music works well, too.