General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Young Girls of Rochefort

The Young Girls of Rochefort (French: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort) is a 1967 French musical film written and directed by Jacques Demy, with music by Michel Legrand, about twin sisters who teach dance and music in the port town of Rochefort and each search for love during a weekend fair. It was Demy's follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and is a Technicolor homage to the classic Hollywood musical.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Jacques Demy (1931–1990), who wrote the scenario, dialogue, and lyrics for all the songs³
Music	Michel Legrand (1932–2019), who composed and conducted the score³
Filming	31 May to 27 August 1966, on location in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime⁴
French release	Visa dated 3 March 1967; theatrical release 8 March 1967; official duration 128 minutes¹
Principal cast	Catherine Deneuve (Delphine), Françoise Dorléac (Solange), Danielle Darrieux (Yvonne), Jacques Perrin (Maxence), Gene Kelly (Andy Miller), Michel Piccoli (Simon Dame), George Chakiris (Etienne)³
Production companies	Parc Film and Madeleine Films (Paris); producers Mag Bodard and Gilbert de Goldschmidt³^•⁴
Recognition	Academy Award nomination for Best Music, Score of a Musical Picture (1969)⁵

Spoilers

Story and style

Delphine and Solange Garnier are 25-year-old twins: Delphine, the blonde, gives dance lessons, and Solange, the redhead, teaches music.⁸ Both dream of love and of leaving their quiet seaside town. When a fair brings sailors, painters, musicians, and carnival workers to Rochefort, a web of near-misses keeps the right people tantalizingly close without their realizing it.⁹ Their mother, Yvonne, runs a café; the twins are hired as carnival singers, Solange falls for an American musician, and Delphine leaves her boyfriend to search the town for her ideal man.¹⁰

Demy described the film's purpose in musical terms: "The plot and the storyline matter less to me than the feelings I wanted to express through the songs, the dialogue, the dance. I wanted to make a film that gives a feeling of freedom. A film about joy that sends you out of the theater with a confidence in life that gives you the strength to move mountains."⁶ Critics have noted that beneath the bright surface runs a somber undercurrent of missed connections that lingers even when love triumphs.¹⁰

The film follows the conventions of the Hollywood musical closely: alternating spoken and sung or danced sequences, opening and closing with a medley, lip-syncing, and flamboyant color as a mode of expression. The number Chanson d'un jour d'été pays direct homage to George Cukor's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) through the sisters' choreography, the contrast of their hair color, and their red sequined dresses; Maen's choreography recalls Jerome Robbins's work on West Side Story, and the casting of George Chakiris, Bernardo in that film, reinforces the reference.¹¹

Production and creative team

Demy and Legrand first met during the shooting of Lola (1961), one of the early films of the French New Wave. Their collaboration produced the sung-through The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and then Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, which Demy conceived as a classical French musical giving a large place to dance and ballets.⁶ Demy worked for two years on the film's musical construction with Legrand, taking joy as the guiding thread.⁷

The technical crew included Ghislain Cloquet as cinematographer, Bernard Evein as production designer, Jacqueline Moreau as costume designer, and Jean Hamon as editor; Norman Maen choreographed five ballets for the film.³^•⁴ Demy cast Catherine Deneuve as Delphine alongside her real-life sister Françoise Dorléac (1942–1967) as Solange, and surrounded them with Gene Kelly (1912–1996), Danielle Darrieux (1917–2017), an actress for whom Demy felt deep admiration, Michel Piccoli (1925–2020), Jacques Perrin (1941–2022), George Chakiris, and Grover Dale.⁷

Music

Legrand's score mixes jazz, swing, and the American musical idiom; the hybridization of operetta, jazz, and the Hollywood musical has been described as helping define a distinctive French film-musical language.¹² The jazz, imbued with pop and samba, has been called a role apart in the history of cinema, and the songs are set to lyrics in alexandrines written by Demy.¹³ The score earned the film its Academy Award nomination for Best Music, Score of a Musical Picture.⁵

Filming in Rochefort

Demy chose Rochefort for its particular architecture, scouting the town accompanied by Agnès Varda and Bernard Evein.⁴^•⁷ Filming ran from 31 May to 27 August 1966, and the town's residents took part as extras, skipping school or work to appear in the CinemaScope production.⁴ Among the locations, a music shop was built into a corner of the Bourse du commerce at the angle of the rue de l'Arsenal and the rue Jean Jaurès, where a scene was shot on the first day of summer.¹⁴ The town has kept the film in its public memory: the municipal archives hold photographs, posters, magazines, records, and correspondence related to the shoot, and the city marked the 60th anniversary of the filming in 2026.¹⁵^•⁷

Reception and legacy

The film was released in France on 8 March 1967 under its original title; its American title is The Young Girls of Rochefort.¹^•¹⁴ Françoise Dorléac died in a car accident shortly after its release, giving the sisters' performances a retrospective poignancy.⁵ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 98% Tomatometer rating from 45 reviews, with a critics' consensus that it "pays colorful homage to classic Hollywood musicals while earning its own emotionally affecting place of honor in the genre."¹⁰

Later tributes. Agnès Varda, Demy's widow, honored him with the 1993 documentary The Young Girls Turn 25, made around the 25th anniversary of the shoot, and included it among the supplements of the Criterion Collection edition.² The film's influence reaches later Hollywood: Damien Chazelle's La La Land openly draws on it.⁵ A 2K digital restoration with a 5.1 surround soundtrack was issued by the Criterion Collection (Spine #717).² Demy set both The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort in ports, a setting the film historian Matthieu Orléan, curator of the 2013 Cinémathèque française exhibition "Le Monde enchanté de Jacques Demy," connects to the director's lifelong attachment to his native Nantes as a place of departure and adventure.¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026