Let’s all have a late ’60s spring! It’s all around us, with Mad Men back for its final season on Sunday, and, in my neighborhood, The Young Girls of Rochefort coming to BAM for a whole week starting tonight.
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), written and directed by Jacques Demy, is so corny I can’t believe how much I love it. It has none of the tragedy of Umbrellas of Cherbourg nor the twisted fairy tale horror of Donkey Skin, which is still my favorite of his films with composer Michel Legrand. But it is unquestionably something that must be seen in a cinema. It has dance numbers and huge, colorful sets, Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac, George Chakiris (better known as Nardo from West Side Story), and Gene Kelly as The American.
An ad for the final season.
When you think of late ’60s music you think of the Jefferson Airplane or Motown or the “White Album,” but I can’t get enough of what “the squares” were doing at the time. Bachrach, Bert Kempfert, Morton Gould and His Orchestra, The Living Strings, Sinatra singing Joni Mitchell, Engelbert singing just about anything: the encounter between old show biz and the new counterculture. Legrand and Demy made a few great films out of it.
Apparently Matthew Weiner digs it too. You could see from the very first episodes of Mad Men, in the number of beatniks Don Draper kept coming across, that sooner or later he would employ one and co-opt his sensibility – and he has – and that a day of reckoning was looming for the ad guys, a full-on collision between the antiwar, anti-establishment movement and the corporate asses they make a swank living by kissing. That’s what I predict this season. I just hope we see Sal return for a triumphant out-of-the-closet moment, and that it’s tasteful.
Françoise Dorléac in 1967.
As for Françoise Dorléac, she died the year Young Girls of Rochefort came out, allegedly while speeding to catch a plane at the Nice airport. If you think Gene Kelly’s too old for her, well, in one of her other films she was paired with David Niven, who was born older than middle-aged Gene Kelly. I can’t wait to see her on the big screen this week.
More Has To Happen 
[…] and Coltrane. Few of us can forget the first time we ever watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (and I’ve written in the past about Jacques Demy’s next film, The Young Girls of […]