This film has been waiting for me for years and I knew that I would like it but the actual bliss of experiencing it still came as a surprising delight at its bright colours, its sung dialogue in which hearts crack audibly and postmen deliver bills, the soaring melodies but also the musical wit of Legrand's score. It's ghost is still there, haunting High School Musical, which I caught the night before and which is also unexpectedly good. Its similarly boldly-coloured and nearly as lost in music. The young lovers mope as if in a Bergman movie, and leaving high school is akin to meeting a hooded man with a scythe: putting on a musical is the only wall to push up against oncoming oblivion. It doesn't have the wistful realism of Cherbourg, and it doesn't have Ann Vernon and Deneuve, unreal in her silvery beauty and Zac Ephron is just a prop with well conditioned hair compared to Nino Castelnuovo and Roland Cassard.
In the clip below, the final scene, the estranged lovers talk about petrol - super or standard - unable and unwilling to be what they were once to each other, the music remembers and when she drives off, the music lives life at the level they never managed to sustain - and, perhaps, the film is wise to suggest, this was for the best. Its as sad as the end of Eugene Onegin, but set in a petrol staion in Nantes.
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Manchesterisms
9 hours ago
