Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Young Girls of Rochefort
1967 · Jacques Demy · The Young Girls of Rochefort on Sightlines
Two sisters dance across the square of a real seaside town in the same pinks and lemons as the walls behind them. The walls are that color because Demy had them painted that way — actual façades of actual Rochefort, repainted to match a palette. Not a set. A town put into costume.
That one decision holds the whole film, so start there.
The New Wave went into the streets on a principle inherited from Bazin: a real place photographed is worth more than a built one, and the camera owes the world its own light. The studio musical Demy adored did the reverse, dressing an entire town into a hermetic pastel dreamscape where set color choreographs the emotional register as firmly as the script does. Meet Me in St. Louis is the model there; The Band Wagon supplies the saturation. Demy refused to pick a side. He took a working port and painted it.
Deleuze's name for what that produces is the colour-image: color that stops belonging to objects and starts absorbing them, until a figure doesn't stand in a place so much as live inside a hue. He built the idea largely out of the MGM musical, which makes it the right tool for Demy. Here the absorption isn't lighting or filtration. The masonry has been brought up to the pitch of the feeling.
Now the structure, which is where the film gets strange. Delphine and Solange dream of Paris, of art, of ideal love, while the men who would suit them circle within blocks. Nobody collides. Deleuze, working from the simplest fact about a frame, separates two kinds of outside. The out-of-field-relative is adjacent space: the next room, the next street, somewhere the camera could reach by turning. The out-of-field-absolute is what belongs to no location at all, a beyond the frame opens onto without being able to point at it. Demy's comedy and his ache both come from characters confusing the two. The ideal love they sing about has no address. The man has one, and it's around the corner, and the song about the ideal is precisely what keeps them from walking over to look.
Take the near-misses as farce plumbing and the film is charming and slight. Take them as structure and you get the real proposition: longing here is spatial, not psychological. Nobody has an inner obstacle. The obstacle is a wall, a corner, a departure time.
What lets a film survive that much withholding is the dancing, and here Deleuze's reading of the musical earns its keep. In an ordinary scene a person moves and the world stays put. In a number, he says, the relation inverts: the dancer's movement stops being an individual act and becomes the movement of world, the world's own motion taking the body over. Demy imports Gene Kelly to make the debt unmissable — the athletic, street-level choreography of Singin' in the Rain, and from An American in Paris the dream-ballet principle in which extended dance replaces plot outright. Demy's own invention is to run the number past the people who can actually dance. Sailors, fairground carnies, shoppers, a truck pulling into the square: the traffic of the town moves at the same tempo, so that being in Rochefort at all means being moved. Chance gets promoted to choreographer. And unlike The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which sang every line of dialogue, this one loosens into spoken scenes bracketed by song, which means you can hear the threshold — the moment a world tips over into music.
The cast list should ring a bell for anyone who watches contemporary cinema. Many characters, weakly linked, visitors passing through, a plot that is really a traffic pattern. Deleuze calls this a dispersive-situation and treats it as a symptom: the action-image losing its grip, cinema no longer able to bind people into one causal chain. Directors after the war used it for anomie. Demy uses the identical structure for happiness. He also quietly declines the engine his ancestors ran on, the convergent parallel cutting the American musical inherited from Griffith, whose whole purpose is to bring the lines together at the last possible second. Demy keeps them parallel. He had form: Lola founded his interlocking world of recurring characters crossing by chance in a coastal town, a shared film universe decades before that phrase meant merchandising — built, in his version, on people missing each other rather than assembling.
Under the sun there is a crime, murmured through the picture and played close to a shrug. Deleuze describes a derived-milieu: a concrete social setting that turns out to be a thin surface over a world of raw drive. Naturalism's specialty, usually shot in squalor. Demy has the structure and refuses to develop it, and the refusal is the point. He lets you know the paint is paint. Sweetness needs salt.
Then the twins. Two images of one face, each the other's reflection, played by sisters who were sisters. Deleuze's crystal-image is exactly that: an actual image and its virtual double exchanging until you can't say which one is the original. And the film acquired a facet nobody designed. Françoise Dorléac died in a car accident months after the premiere. The square now holds two times at once, a bright weekend and the record of something already gone, and no viewing can pull them apart. The crystal's real business, Deleuze says, is time itself — the present passing while preserving itself as past. You can watch it happen inside one dance.
So watch the edges. Not the dancers; the street they are about to turn down, the doorway someone just left, the café window with the wrong person in it. Demy's argument, made in pink and lemon across a widescreen frame, is that the most romantic thing a frame can hold is what it leaves out. Whether a near-miss is a failure or the truest shape longing takes on film, he declines to settle. Legrand's twins' theme, meanwhile, got loose and became a standard — the tune left Rochefort and has been circulating ever since.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field-relative — The ideal partners 'circle within blocks' of the sisters for the length of the film — the beloved is permanently in the adjacent street the camera could reach by turning.
- out-of-field-absolute — Delphine and Solange dream of Paris, art and ideal love — an object with no location in the town or anywhere else, confused throughout with the man one street over.
- movement of world — Kelly's imported street-level choreography (the An American in Paris / Singin' in the Rain debt) extended past the dancers into the town's whole traffic — sailors, fairground troupe, passers-by moved at the same tempo, 'chance is a choreographer.'
- affective colour — Whole façades of the actual town of Rochefort repainted in sherbet pinks and lemon yellows so that costume, set and figure share one palette governing the widescreen frame.
- dispersive-situation — Sailors, artists, musicians and chance visitors passing through town during a weekend fair, connected only by a web of near-misses rather than by a causal chain.
- hyalosign — Twin sisters as each other's mirror, played by real-life sisters Deneuve and Dorléac; after Dorléac's death months post-premiere the square holds both a living present and a lost past indiscernibly.
- derived-milieu — The literally repainted pastel town as surface — 'beneath the sun there are shadows,' a bizarre crime subplot murmuring underneath and played almost as a shrug.