The Young Girls of Rochefort

Is it possible to be both old-style and modern? Does the present not repeat the past as much as it transforms it? Are they not intertwined, under the guise of déjà vu and heard?

Over the course of a weekend at a fair in Rochefort, characters from the past reunite (Andy meets Simon, who sees Yvonne again, whose father meets an old friend, who himself knew a dancer and a Madame Desnoyer straight out of Demy's Lola, etc.), while others rub shoulders without knowing that they (might) share a future (Solange and Andy; Delph, almost like an oracle, leaves Guillaume Lancien for a new man, Maxence): chance and fate build bridges between the expected and the possible.

In this melancholic yet light-hearted romp, the Hollywood musical meets the French New Wave (natural locations and long shots): there is the search for true love, but as so often with Demy (from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to A Room in Town), the glass slipper of the true-hearted (sold in the Cinderella shoe shop on Rochefort's main square?) stands side by side with military and police boots, present in various forms on every corner of the town, right down to the little figures discreetly cut out by Mr Dame.

A metaphysical musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort never ceases to explore its distant relationship with the history of this Hollywood genre... represented in the film under the double guise of the old (Gene Kelly) and the new (George Chakiris).

Laurent Le Forestier (CEC,UNIL)