Two beautiful girls and their lovely mother find singing, dancing, and love in the seaside town of Rochefort. Delphine falls for Maxence (the least convincing looking sailor since Popeye), Solange falls for Andy (Gene Kelly, who is more than twice the age of his paramour) and mother Yvonne finally yields to the man she jilted years ago (because he had a silly name). This romantic confection is delivered wrapped in exquisite colours, spontaneous dancing, and pretty, if not memorable, music. The film has some odd touches: for some reason, a gruesome murder is rolled into the plot, allowing for a little black humour and for a while all of the conversation seems to be in rhyming couplets (or at least the subtitles were). Most of the lead's singing voices were dubbed in (sometimes not particularly well) but I was quite impressed by the rhyming song subtitles (clever, albeit not always accurate, translations). Overall, a fun, colourful and very French musical (although not nearly as French as Remy's great 1964 musical "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg"). A sad footnote: Françoise Dorléac, Catherine Deneuve's actual sister who played her twin sister in this film, was killed in a car accident shortly after this film was released in Europe.
Review of The Young Girls of Rochefort
