The Young Girls of Rochefort, Jacques Demy's 1967 musical and a follow-up to his more famous 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, was assigned to me this month in Flickchart Friends' Favorites Fiesta (yes, that's a lot of F's), my monthly group where you are randomly matched up with another person and watch their favorite movie that you haven't yet seen. I thought Young Girls made a great choice for December, as its undoubtedly festive atmosphere would be a perfect accompaniment to the Christmas season.
On my own I had selected to watch White Christmas, the 1954 Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye holiday classic directed by Michael Curtiz, which I knew about only as a holiday classic I had not yet seen. I noticed a while back it's streaming on Stan. I did not know it involved singing and dancing, though with these stars, that should have been a safe assumption.
I watched them on consecutive nights, Tuesday the 22nd and Wednesday the 23rd, the latter while wrapping presents. Not only did they both increase my holiday joy tenfold, but they also both popped off my screen in beautiful Technicolor, the kind we don't get anymore, the kind that took my breath away.
Technicolor, as you know, was the predominant mid-century method for coloring film, at least certain films, the biggest spectacles out there. I'm not going to get into a technical explanation of what it was, because there's a Wikipedia article for that. But you know it when you see it. The reds are redder, the greens are greener, and the purples -- oh, the purples!
I don't know how to describe the effect of watching Technicolor in 2020, but you've probably done it yourself, so maybe you don't need me to. And if you have, you are always struck by a moment when you ask yourself: "How come colors don't look like that anymore?"
If you haven't, here are some examples from these movies:
Again, not trying to impress you with any technical knowledge I don't have, which should be perfectly clear by the following comment: I have no idea why colors don't look like that anymore. I mean, aren't colors colors? Shouldn't you be able to reproduce any color you want on screen?
Yes and no. Yes you should. No you can't. These colors pop more than popcorn. Does it have to do with their respective lines of demarcation? Do today's colors bleed into one another more?
Let's take a filmmaker who is likely to use a lot of different colors in his films. Say, Tim Burton. Why can't Tim Burton make a film whose colors look like Technicolor? Shouldn't we have the technology?
And yet we don't, and he can't. Which makes this era of filmmaking even more special.
I considered at one point subjecting my kids to White Christmas, and I'm ultimately glad I didn't. For one, I needed to wrap their presents. But there's also a lot of non-Christmas material to wade through in order to get to the Christmas material. Besides, I'm not sure they yet associate Christmas with classic, nostalgic cultural objects like this. They've barely seen any movies made before 1960 -- The Wizard of Oz and The Day the Earth Stood Still are the only two I'm sure of -- and it's hard to be nostalgic for something that has no connection to anything you've ever done.
But if I had shown the kids these movies, once they got past the fact that one of them was entirely in French, I think even they would be wowed by these colors. And hopefully, the singing and dancing too.
So fate stepped in and gave me an absolutely brilliant lead-up to The Big Day this year. Whatever else I watch from here on out, I can't imagine it would put me in a better mood.
Not a place I expected to be at the end of 2020, but that's the power of movies I guess.
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