Part of Music City Mondays and Restoration Roundup
“If four stars, in the Scene‘s Movie Guide, denotes a must-see movie, Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical deserves five. It’s one of my absolute favorite films. Girl (Catherine Deneuve) loves boy (Nino Castelnuovo) in a seaside French town splashed with impossibly gorgeous Technicolor. Girl and boy swear eternal love, until the boy is shipped off to the conflict in Algiers. Then the girl learns she is pregnant. With every line sung to a lilting Michel Legrand score—the main theme, Americanized as “I Will Wait for You,” became a pop standard—it strikes some people at first as the silliest thing they’ve ever seen. But few movies evoke the transience and naïveté of first love as piercingly as its youthful intensity. It culminates in a glorious final image, a gas station dusted by a Christmas Eve snowfall, that may be the saddest happy ending in movie history. Get a stout box of Kleenexes, take someone you love and don’t let go of their hand.” —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (May 6, 2004)
Restored in 4K in 2024 by Ciné-Tamaris at Éclair Classics and L.E. Diapason laboratories, from the wet scan of the original camera negative and the three-track stereo mix of music and voices. Restoration supervised by Mathieu Remy and Rosalie Varda-Demy.
“It continues to charm and delight for the same reasons it did back in 1964.” —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
“One of the most romantic films ever made.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times
“A glorious romantic confection unlike any other in movie history.” —Hal Hinson, Washington Post