I still don’t get what the big fuss is when it comes to Jacques Demy. He produces perfectly adequate homages to the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s but he seems to get far too much credit for being French and therefore more sophisticated than his Hollywood contemporaries. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is charming, whimsical, occasionally emotionally moving and full of striking imagery. It is burdened by the fact that it features forgettable songs but there are plenty of musicals that manage to overcome this all too common problem. It’s nice and I won’t deny that it put a smile on my face but I do think that it has been extravagantly overpraised for a couple of reasons.

I recently finished a university course on classic cinema and, when we discussed European arthouse classics, my classmates would typically praise a film like Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) by making a dig at an English language-classic with similar themes. I would witness people rolling their eyes and complaining about the lack of realism in a film like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and I couldn’t help but balk at their criticisms. In a lot of cases, it seemed like they would throw out these comments in an effort to prove that they were superior to those of us who actually find value in mainstream Hollywood cinema. It always seemed like a reductive, silly criticism and I became even more confused when some of them would go from lavishing praise on Jean-Luc Godard to tearing apart the American films that he had championed when he served as a film critic. I began to feel as though the packaging was more important than the content for a lot of cinephiles. If a film is French or Italian or German and happens to feature an icy, aloof leading lady, it gets their seal of approval. If it was an MGM romantic comedy directed by an unglamorous American studio director, it gets automatically dismissed.

You can find The Young Girls of Rochefort on countless lists of the greatest films ever made and I simply can’t understand why it’s always there. It is decidedly mediocre and it can’t hold a candle to a mid-tier Stanley Donen effort like Royal Wedding (1951). I can’t help but think that the prestige associated with the names that were involved in this production helped to build up its reputation. People just assume that everything that Catherine Deneuve touches turns to gold and, in many cases, this wasn’t exactly true.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that this was some sort of high point for the musical genre. Demy was no Vincente Minnelli.