Jacques Demy

The Young Girls of Rochefort

The Young Girls of Rochefort

Jacques Demy followed up The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with another musical about missed connections and second chances, this one a more effervescent confection. Twins Delphine and Solange, a dance instructor and a music teacher (played by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac), long for big-city life; when a fair comes through their quiet port town, so does the possibility of escape. With its jazzy Michel Legrand score, pastel paradise of costumes, and divine supporting cast (George Chakiris, Grover Dale, Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, and Gene Kelly), The Young Girls of Rochefort is a tribute to Hollywood optimism from sixties French cinema’s preeminent dreamer.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1967
  • 126 minutes
  • Color
  • 2.35:1
  • French
  • Spine #717

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • French television interview from 1966 featuring director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand discussing the music for the film
  • Conversation from 2014 between Demy biographer Jean-Pierre Berthomé and costume designer Jacqueline Moreau
  • Episode from a multipart 1966 Belgian television series on the making of the film
  • Agnès Varda’s 1993 documentary The Young Girls Turn 25 (in the DVD box set, appears on the Une chambre en ville disc)
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

The Essential Jacques Demy

The Essential Jacques Demy

Blu-ray Box Set

6 Discs

$99.96

Special Features

  • 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • French television interview from 1966 featuring director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand discussing the music for the film
  • Conversation from 2014 between Demy biographer Jean-Pierre Berthomé and costume designer Jacqueline Moreau
  • Episode from a multipart 1966 Belgian television series on the making of the film
  • Agnès Varda’s 1993 documentary The Young Girls Turn 25 (in the DVD box set, appears on the Une chambre en ville disc)
  • Trailer
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Young Girls of Rochefort
Cast
Catherine Deneuve
Delphine Garnier
Françoise Dorléac
Solange Garnier
Jacques Perrin
Maxence
Gene Kelly
Andy Miller
Danielle Darrieux
Yvonne Garnier
Michel Piccoli
Simon Dame
Henri Crémieux
Subtil Dutrouz
Jacques Riberolles
Guillaume Lancien
George Chakiris
Étienne
Grover Dale
Bill
Credits
Director
Jacques Demy
Written by
Jacques Demy
Original music by
Michel Legrand
Choreographer
Norman Maen
Cinematographer
Ghislain Cloquet
Production designer
Bernard Evein
Costume designer
Jacqueline Moreau
Sound
Jacques Maumont
Editor
Jean Hamon
Producers
Gilbert de Goldschmidt
Producers
Mag Bodard

Current

Sister Act: Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in The Young Girls of Rochefort
Sister Act: Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in The Young Girls of Rochefort
A sparkling homage to the golden age of Hollywood, Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort tells the story of dance instructor Delphine and music teacher Solange, twin sisters who yearn for excitement and romance beyond the confines of their qu…
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment

A friend and longtime scholar of Jacques Demy ruminates on the great director’s career, as well as the port hometown they shared—which would become a magical movie location.

By Jean-Pierre Berthomé

The Young Girls of Rochefort: Not the Same Old Song and Dance
The Young Girls of Rochefort: Not the Same Old Song and Dance

Everyday life gets a musical makeover in Jacques Demy’s tale of chance and love, a film of exquisitely sad happiness.

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Demy Monde
Demy Monde
Film scholar James Quandt created a nearly hour-long visual essay for our new collector’s set The Essential Jacques Demy. Titled Jacques Demy, A to Z, it elaborates on twenty-six concepts important to understanding the cinema of this singular filmm…
Matthew Weiner’s Top 10
Matthew Weiner’s Top 10

Matthew Weiner is the award-winning creator, writer, and executive producer of the series Mad Men.

Explore

Catherine Deneuve

Actor

Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve

One of cinema’s great beauties, Catherine Deneuve (born Catherine Dorléac in Paris in 1943) is also an icon of the transformative cinematic 1960s. The daughter of two actors and the sister of three (one of whom, Françoise Dorléac, died in a car crash in 1967), Deneuve has acting in her blood. After her major breakthrough in Jacques Demy’s poignant 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Deneuve continued to prove she was more than just a pretty face in Roman Polanski’s thriller Repulsion and Luis Buñuel’s surreal erotic daydream Belle de jour. Those films may exploit Deneuve’s crystalline loveliness for its seeming inscrutability, but her portrayals of sexual repression in both (and her shocking embodiment of schizophrenia in the former) make for two of the most vivid performances of the era. Those roles set her on the path to becoming a full-fledged movie star, and she went on to act for François Truffaut, Alain Cavalier, Marco Ferreri, and Jean-Pierre Melville. Her performances have grown richer as she’s aged; today, she is a true grand dame of the cinema, and her compellingly enigmatic looks—once interpreted as fragile—have taken on a mature imperiousness, as evidenced in such films as Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (in which she costars with her daughter with Marcello Mastroianni, Chiara Mastroianni).