25 Days of Music: Day 4

Movie music, with a twist.

What to say about Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? It’s a movie, an opera, a confection, a reverie. It’s the film that made Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo into stars. Damien Chazelle, director of the delightful La La Land, the overwhelming Babylon, and the execrable Whiplash, says The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the greatest movie ever made, and it’s clear that La La Land was an intentional homage. It’s the kind of hyperromantic movie that would normally have me rolling my eyes, but there is something preternaturally sincere about it that bypasses all my cynicism circuits and goes straight into my heart.

As you can see, it’s an opera, i.e., there’s no spoken dialogue—everything is sung, from the most soaring declaration of love to “what are you doing after work?” It’s a classic story of thwarted love, with an ending that will yank your heart out through your tear ducts.

Aside from the music, the color direction is the star of the show. Every frame of this film is full of vibrant, vivid colors, all of them coordinated and planned not just to support, but also to advance the story. It’s hypnotic in a way that few films are and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The full soundtrack is available for streaming on Spotify and probably everywhere else you listen to music.

That’s not today’s music, though.

There is a main musical theme in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a melody that repeats with some frequency. In French the lyric is “Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi” (“I’ll never be able to live without you”), but it was adapted to a song in English: “I Will Wait for You,” as sung by the golden voice of Connie Francis. We will probably return to Connie Francis in this series.

Specifically, it is sung at the end of an episode of the animated show Futurama called “Jurassic Bark.” For the uninitiated, the show takes place in the year 3000; on December 31, 1999, the protagonist, pizza delivery guy Philip Fry, was accidentally(?) frozen for a thousand years and emerged in 3000 as his same clueless self, and much of the brilliant humor comes from his fish-out-of-water antics.

In this episode Fry has been reminiscing about his dog, Seymour. He rescued Seymour as a stray, and loved him, but Seymour was only 3 in 1999, when Fry was frozen. They find Seymour’s fossilized remains in a museum and are preparing to clone the dog so Fry can see him again.

Get a Kleenex, then watch:

Today’s song is specifically that piece of music with that bit of animation. A perfect pairing, no notes. I hope you're OK.