Imagine that one day, people just start singing at you -- not singing songs or hymns or arias, but just pointlessly warbling everything they have to say, from "Good morning" to "You want fries with that?" How long do you think it would take before you slapped someone across the face and screamed, "STOP SINGING! Talk like a normal human being!" For me, it would take about twenty minutes. And that's what I learned from *The Umbrellas of Cherbourg*.
The music seems primarily to serve the purpose of stretching a fairly thin plot across ninety minutes of screen time. In a real musical, with good songs and dancing, this can actually work (see, e.g., *Singin' in the Rain* and *On the Town*). But this isn't a real musical, more's the pity.
Apart from the cinematography (and even that gets cloying by the end) and the opening title sequence (which is truly wonderful), I honestly can't see what so many people see in this film.
The music seems primarily to serve the purpose of stretching a fairly thin plot across ninety minutes of screen time. In a real musical, with good songs and dancing, this can actually work (see, e.g., *Singin' in the Rain* and *On the Town*). But this isn't a real musical, more's the pity.
Apart from the cinematography (and even that gets cloying by the end) and the opening title sequence (which is truly wonderful), I honestly can't see what so many people see in this film.