Les demoiselles de Rochefort

Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac, ravishingly beautiful real-life siblings, play twin sisters in Jacques Demy's 1967 tribute to the MGM musicals of the early '50s. It breaks your heart to see them together here -- Dorléac died in a car accident only months later. But the movie itself, alas, has nothing of its own to draw you emotionally. In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which was released three years earlier, Demy used music to point up the romance in the everyday lives of the characters; here he uses dance, but in so self-conscious a manner that the artifice becomes leaden.

It's a surprisingly heavy-handed film. Demy alludes visually to Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon and especially to his An American in Paris, and Gene Kelly shows up to play another version of his famous title role in that movie; there are several references to Demy's Lola, a joke about Demy's frequent collaborator, the composer Michel Legrand, and of course Deneuve and Dorléac are cast as sisters. They wear matching outfits and have matching professions (one is a dancer, the other a pianist); and each ends up with the man she's fated to love, after they share a brief, carefree dalliance with a pair of American carnival itinerants (George Chakiris and Grover Dale). That's entirely too many twosies for one picture.

The cast, which also includes Michel Piccoli, Danielle Darrieux, and Jacques Perrin, is terrifically appealing, the film is splendid to look at (Ghislain Cloquet did the Dufy-inspired cinematography, restored to its original sheen in this new print), and the Legrand score belongs unmistakably to his great period. But on the whole the picture is rather a yawn.

-- Steve Vineberg