Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This surreally cliched plot is made even more hyperbolic by the fact that it is indeed sung. All the way through. In French. To the accompaniment of a synthetic, Esquivel-esque cocktail jazz. For the English-speaking viewer, the experience of watching auto mechanics lip-synch their way through so much ear-coating ultrasynth reaches that special level of pleasurableness which is just shy of unbearable...
Totalitarian tackiness extends to every aspect of this lighter-than-air film. The plot is lovingly predictable. Sixteen year old Genvieve (Catherine Deneuve) is leered at by almost every male in the village of Cherbourg where she works in her mother's umbrella store. She falls for the earnestly handsome automechanic Guy(Nino Castelnuovo) who ruins everything by being drafted. Before leaving for Algeria, he somewhat deviously impregnates her, perhaps to be sure she'll 'wait for him'. But his plan backfires when the pregnant, helpless Genvieve is married off to the rich, wolf-like diomand dealer Roland Cassard (Marc...
...score and plot are mimed-out with plucky good-naturedness by the cast, which is completely dominated by its women. Deneuve looks so breakably pure as Genvieve, replete with little bows and white gloves, that even she seems relieved by her deflowerment. Her feline mother slinks about in tight black cocktail dresses and blood red suits, exuding sheer power via over-ripe sensuality and bartering Genvieve off to the highest bidder. Madeline, the 'plain girl' whom Guy eventually settles for, looks exactly like the goody-good martyr she is, with immaculately well brushed hair and the inevitable hairband. Measured against...
...PLOT, PLOT, PLOT: THE MASS-PRODUCTION DREAM FACTORY...
...Statement may have a classic thriller's plot--a character on the run, private power plays behind public facades--but it unfolds in a moral universe infinitely more complex and compromised than the white hats vs. the black hats so typical of the genre. The novel asks not only who is trying to murder Brossard but also why Brossard has been able to remain in France for 44 years, receiving asylum from various Roman Catholic monasteries, and a 1971 presidential pardon for the crimes he committed during the German occupation and the Vichy regime...