In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo play young paramours separated by circumstance. It rains without stopping in Cherbourg—poised at the northern tip of France—sometimes softly, often in sheets. Thankfully, Geneviève, Deneuve’s character, runs an umbrella shop. The city is washed in spring pastels: lilac, lemon, pink. As Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote in The Secret Garden, spring “is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine.”
Spring takes a stranger, more surreal form in Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965), Federico Fellini’s first color film. Sandra Milo, floating on a flower-covered swing while wearing a corset and veil, is the free spirit in his dreamscapes.
