Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort | The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

I normally hate musicals and have always thought they're for people with low attention spans: thin piece of narrative, then largely irrelevant crappy song, repeat to the end. OK I'm very late watching one of Jacques Demy's films, but I can see a distinct difference from the norm. I've yet to see Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), where the songs are the entire narrative, but I've just seen Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which is roughly half spoken, half sung, and here too the singing is an integral part of the narrative: you're forced to follow the words carefully. This is Demy's paeon to the American musical, and between the lines you are reminded of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin arriving in New York as sailors and singing of the city's glories in Stanley Donen's On the Town (1949), and more particularly of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell singing 'Two Little Girls from Little Rock' in Howard Hawk's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1954) when Catherine Deneuve (as Delphine Garnier) and her (also real) sister Françoise Dorléac (as Solange), also both in glittery red dresses, get up on stage in Place Colbert, Rochefort and start singing and dancing away. And yet at the same time it could be an update of a lost Shakespearean comedy.

In fact a 53-year-old Gene Kelly himself (as Andy Miller) is in this film, along with other American performers such as George Chakiris and Grover Dale (as Étienne and Bill, members of a travelling troupe). There was an American and a French version of this film and the singing is dubbed by everyone apart from Danielle Darrieux (who is the café-owning mother of the sisters: Yvonne Garnier).

This is a sumptuous feast of a film, enthusiastically performed amidst bright pastel, campy colours. But there are unfulfilled wishes here, people initially dodging inadvertently out of the way of the love of their life, and there is an odd minor sub-plot about former café frequenter Subtil Dutrouz (Henri Crémieux) killing and cutting up the woman who's been rejecting him for decades. Delphine and Solange believe they'll find the love of their life in Paris and long to live there, and Yvonne tortures herself over the man – Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) – she left for a Mexican several years previously, simply because she couldn't stand thought of being called 'Madame Dame'. Unbeknown to all three women, the love of their live is actually in Rochefort: Simon has a music shop in the town, Delphine is the ideal woman for sailor/artistic painter Maxence (Jacques Perrin), and Andy longs for the much younger Solange, whose piece of music of hers he has when she accidently dropped it: she too yearns for him. Of course, in the end they all come together, although Demy originally had planned death for Maxence as he hitched his way out of Rochefort.

This is a hugely successful masterpiece, worthy of viewing multiple times.