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It all started with Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), a musical by Jacques Demy which is also known as the film that made Catherine Deneuve a star.

As I was browsing through my Netflix movie queue, I came across Les parapluies de Cherbourg’s colorful image and since it was available on instant play, I took a chance and started watching. I’m not fond of 60s movies; you see I’m tall and skinny and the style just doesn’t fit at all. I’m not a fan of musicals either, but I started enjoying this one more and more as Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), who works at a gas station, shared his Friday night plans with his work buddies and then hopped on his bicycle to meet Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve). Tres Jolie!.. as the French would say.

The rest goes very much as expected. The romantic couple Guy and Genevieve make plans of wedding and kids when suddenly, Guy is called to serve at the army. Genevieve’s widow mother cannot afford their middle class lifestyle and wants to marry off Genevieve. The melodramatic story, as we know it, begins.

One of the few high points of the movie is where Guy and Genevieve sing together Les parapluies de Cherbourg; which was later translated into English as I will wait for you. The music itself brings a flood of emotions, not mentioning the strong expressions Catherine Deneuve portrays as the romantic young girl.

It was very distancing for me to see Catherine Denevue as the amazingly pretty star of what I would call a “Turkish movie.” As I was growing up back in Istanbul, I spent alarmingly a lot of time watching the reruns of Turkish romantic movies, which I know understand were merely copycats of Hollywood or European soap operas. There were three major actresses, Turkan Soray, Filiz Akin and Hulya Kocyigit, who were similar to Denevue in Les parapluies de Cherbourg, plain but beautiful. They portrayed the honorable, naive, but at the same time desirable young women who are hard to find in modern times, who did not believe much in free will, but rather accepted their faith.

I watched them because I enjoyed believing that life had a master plan for all of us and that you did not really have to think about anything as long as you were pretty. Because these women really did not think, they just appeared on screen and swallowed every act as the movie played out. So as I was watching Les parapluies de Cherbourg, I could not help but wonder how Catherine Denevue had risen up from that classical “Turkish movie” role to become an actress who shoots 4-5 movies a year at 65 years of age. Each year, at least one of her movies get international recognition and satisfy today’s cinefiles. How much of this success has to do with being French, being pretty, meeting right people and how much of it has to do with Denevue herself, her choices and her understanding of life?

With these questions in mind, I started watching Catherine Denevue…I watched her for two weeks. It was not the movies but Denevue I watched and I had so much pleasure that I’d recommend doing the same to all of you. Check out my next post to see which of Denevue’s movies I watched next and what they got me thinking.

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