Demy’s return to the musical is in an emotional key closer to opera than to Hollywood—more Donizetti than Stanley Donen. A labor strike in Nantes in 1955 is the backdrop for a tale of tragic passions: a striking worker (Richard Berry), boarding with an aristocratic widow (Danielle Darrieux), takes up with the landlady’s daughter (Dominique Sanda), to the consternation of both her possessive husband (Michel Piccoli) and the worker’s pregnant girlfriend. Michel Colombier’s score and Bernard Evein’s chromatically controlled production design define the action throughout, including a color-coordinated labor riot and not one but two singing suicides.
