‘Umbrellas’ Returns With Its Rainbow

French director Jacques Demy was a man in love: with music, with color, with cinema itself. And because of that love, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” his guileless pastel confection, has simply refused to age. If anything, it plays better today than ever.

First released in 1964, “Cherbourg” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, helped launch the career of co-star Catherine Deneuve, solidified that of composer Michel Legrand and was nominated for four Oscars. Some commentators did sniff that the film was rather silly, but that’s beside the point. Of course “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” is silly, but on such a nervy, audacious level that the result is magic.

Being revived starting Friday at the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood in a pristine version that is superior to anything American audiences ever saw, this 32-year-old film remains cinema’s unlikeliest romantic fantasy, an extravagant, one-of-a-kind Franco-Hollywood musical where every word of dialogue is not spoken but sung.

Not sung like arias, but rather melodically recited like recitatif, the way routine talk is handled in operas. And while it may be easy to visualize romantic moments turned to song, to insist that pedestrian dialogue like “Check the ignition on this gentleman’s Mercedes” trip musically off the tongue is an act of mad daring.

All that singing enhances the film’s fantasy element, as does its exceptional use of color. Working with production designer Bernard Evein, director Demy treated his real Cherbourg locations as if they were studio sets, painting and papering walls in the brightest, most intense pastels, wild yellows, pinks and greens that always echoed whatever the stars were wearing in any particular scene. The result is almost by definition one of a kind.

Though it doesn’t seem to matter, and in fact may help the overall effect, all this special effort was put in the service of a slight boy-meets-girl story, also written by Demy, that rather wears its dramatic artificiality as a badge of courage.

Genevieve (Deneuve) is a young girl who works with her mother (Anne Vernon) in the shop that gives the film its name. She’s desperately in love with the handsome Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), an auto mechanic who lives with his bedridden Aunt Elise (Mireille Perrey).

Guy is equally in love, but the pair’s radiant romance (they literally glide through town on a moving track) is interrupted by a draft notice that ships him off to the French army. During Guy’s absence Genevieve discovers that she is pregnant and also begins to receive the attentions of Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), a suave and wealthy diamond merchant her mother favors. And Guy’s aunt continues to think well of Madeleine (Ellen Farner), the young woman who serves as her nurse.

Though he was inspired by the Hollywood musicals he adored, Demy was completely his own man as a director. One of the first New Wave filmmakers, his debut, 1960’s “Lola,” caused Jean-Luc Godard to exclaim in Cahier du Cinema, “It is like Italy. When you’ve seen it once, you want to go back again.”

So it’s not surprising that Demy put his own stamp on this romantic entanglement. “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” may look like an Easter pastry, but it has a characteristic bittersweet, melancholy tone to it, a worldly wise belief that, as Genevieve’s mother says, “People only die of love in the movies.” And Hollywood never would have dreamed of a finale set in a brand-new, ultamodern gas station on a snowy Christmas Eve.

Though its color is one of its main attractions, the first American prints of “Cherbourg” back in the 1960s were, as was the custom, made from a duplicate negative, which dulled the film’s luster for domestic audiences. Shot on unstable Eastmancolor, both the prints and the original release negative faded within a few years, and those singular colors seemed doomed never to be unrecovered.

But then, near the end of his life, Demy remembered that he’d had a separate three-strip negative of the film made to ensure an accurate record of the colors. He began the process of having a new release negative made, efforts that his wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda, continued after his death. With the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture, the result is the print we have now, brighter than any an American audience has seen before with a restored soundtrack added into the bargain.

An act of will and imagination or an act of madness and folly, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” stands as a rare example of the kind of pure cinema that is increasingly hard to find. It’s wonderful to have it back, if only as a glowing reminder of the days when movies were still somebody’s dream.