The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - Plot

Plot

Madame Emery and her 17-year-old daughter Geneviève (Deneuve) sell umbrellas at their tiny boutique in the coastal town of Cherbourg in Normandy, France. Geneviève is in love with 20-year-old Guy (Castelnuovo), a handsome, young auto mechanic who lives with and cares for his sickly aunt, godmother Elise. Her quiet, dedicated, young care-giver, Madeleine (Ellen Farner), is clearly in love with Guy. Subsequently, Guy is drafted, and must leave for a two-year tour of duty in the Algerian War. The night before he leaves, he and Geneviève make love and she becomes pregnant. After he leaves, though, she feels abandoned, as he does not write very frequently, largely due to the restrictions of military life. At her mother's insistence, she marries thirty-ish Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), a quiet, handsome Parisian jeweler who falls in love with Geneviève and is willing to wed her though she is carrying another man's child. (Cassard had previously wooed the title character in Lola, only to be rejected once the father of her child returned—he relates an edited version of this story to Madame Emery with ill-concealed bitterness). The society wedding in a great cathedral shows Geneviève's upward social and economic mobility, but she does not seem at all happy with her situation.

When Guy returns from the war with a knee injury, he learns that Geneviève has married and left Cherbourg, and that the umbrella store has been sold. He attempts to ease back into his previous life, but becomes rebellious due both to the war and to the loss of Geneviève. One day, Guy quits his job after an argument with his boss, and drinks away the day and the evening in seedy port bars. He spends the night with a friendly prostitute named Jenny, who in the morning reveals that her name is actually Geneviève. When he returns to his apartment, he discovers a distraught Madeleine, who tells him tearfully that his godmother has died. He sees that Madeleine loves him, and cleans up his life with her encouragement. With an inheritance from his aunt, he is able to finance a new "American-style" Esso gas station. He asks Madeleine to marry him, and she accepts, though she wonders if he is asking her from despair at Geneviève's actions.

The coda is set in December 1963, approximately six years after the earliest events. Guy is now managing the couple's Esso station. He's with his now upbeat and loving wife Madeleine and their little son François. It is Christmas Eve. Madeleine and François go for a short walk, leaving Guy briefly, after which a new Mercedes pulls into the station. The mink-clad driver turns out to be a sophisticated and visibly well-off Geneviève, accompanied by her (and Guy's) daughter Françoise, who remains in the car. Shocked to see each other, they go inside the station to talk. Geneviève explains this is the first time she has been to Cherbourg since her marriage, and she is only in town on a detour to Paris after picking her daughter up from Cassard's mother in Anjou. Her fairly young mother has died the previous autumn. Her rich husband and child are the only family she has left; she has no children by Cassard. The two converse while Geneviève's car is being filled with gas, and when Geneviève asks Guy if he wants to meet their daughter, he declines. With restrained emotion, they part. As the film ends, Guy greets his wife with a kiss and plays with his son in the snow.