Les Demoiselles de Rochefort

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) (The Young Girls of Rochefort), the first musical comedy by Jacques Demy (1931-1990), is a delightful interlude filmed between the darker Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1963) and Model Shop (1968). This film with sparkling colours, inspired by Hollywood musicals, depicts twin sisters (one is a dancer and the other a musician), incarnated by the blonde Catherine Deneuve (Delphine), previously featuring in Umbrellas, and her real-life sister, the redhead Françoise Dorléac (Solange). Deneuve later played the dual role of the blonde girl and her redhead mother in Peau d'Ane (Donkey Skin) (1970) and went on to create a sassy tandem with the brunette Bernadette Lafont in Zig Zig (Laszlo Szabo, 1974).

Inseparable here, the blonde woman and her redhead opposite number complement each other. Searching for the ideal man and a career in Paris, their duo pays also tribute to the 'two little girls', Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Howard Hawks (1952) (1). After all their comings and goings, as preparations are made for the Rochefort fair, the young ladies – like all the characters – find their alter egos at last; a famous American composer (Gene Kelly) for Solange and a painting sailor (Jacques Perrin, blond for the occasion) for Delphine.

Missed meetings and bumping into each other take place around the café, owned by the mother of the twins, or the school, where the two sisters go in turn to collect Booboo, their younger brother (2) from a second marriage. Everything happens in pairs in this film of doubles in which sequences follow the rhythms of the twins in perfect symmetry. Where they are together in scenes, one may finish what the other began, but scenes in which they are separate also find their echo. Thus scenes where the twins collect their brother from school, at midday for Delphine and 4 pm for Solange, mirror each other. There the sisters meet the two entertainers while dialogue and composition echo each other. Following these two mirrored sequences, each finds her own masculine ideal.