The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (French: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) is a 1964 musical romantic drama film written and directed by Jacques Demy, with music by Michel Legrand. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo star as two young lovers in the French city of Cherbourg, separated by circumstance. The film's dialogue is entirely sung as recitative, including casual conversation, and is sung-through like some operas and stage musicals. It has been seen as the second of an informal tetralogy of Demy films that share some of the same actors, characters, and overall atmosphere of romantic melancholy, coming after Lola (1961) and before The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Model Shop (1969). The French-language film was a co-production between France and West Germany. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d'Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. In the United States, it was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Original Screenplay (Demy), Best Original Score (Demy and Legrand), and Best Original Song for the film's main theme, "I Will Wait for You". It was later adapted into an English-language stage musical. In 2018, a BBC Culture critics' poll ranked the film in the Top 100 Greatest Non-English Films of All Time.