"I can’t explain this movie. It’s just perfection. Sad and funny, light and heavy, full of boisterous color and nonstop singing. Probably the most romantic movie I have ever seen. Catherine Deneuve has never been so lovely. I have never been to France, but I imagine it is just like it is depicted here. Maybe I will never go so I can keep my fantasy and save myself from disappointment. Jacques Demy was a singular talent. There was never anyone like him and there never will be again. I highly recommend the entire box set of his work, but this one will always be my favorite. I remember seeing it on the big screen at the Music Box in Chicago in the early nineties and walking out on clouds while also being filled with an intense melancholy. I can’t think of a single other movie that makes me feel both of those things at the same time and has left those feelings lingering inside me twenty-plus years later. Michel Legrand’s score is, it goes without saying, iconic and magnificent. And what this movie lacks in dancing, Demy makes up for in his constant gliding camera movements. As if the dance is between the actors and his lens. Pure cinema. Perfection."

"Malle is one of my favorite directors. He flirts with genres, tries all sorts of things, travels all around the world, refuses to let go of documentary, his first love (or first milieu)—although his fiction movies are acclaimed. This film, close to his skin and past, is a strong coming-of-age work, set in France under Vichy. Often, in the middle of the day, I think of scenes from Au revoir les enfants, moments of grace like the restaurant sequence, with the mother. French officers burst into the place and ask for citizens’ papers. They find an old Jewish man dining quietly at his table and start to reprimand him, asking him if he knows how to read; the place is, of course, forbidden to “youtres,” as the young French officer says insolently. Suddenly, every patron at the restaurant starts yelling at the officers, insulting them (“Collabo!”), forcing them to leave. And then, among the clientele, German officers stand up and order them to exit the place. Strong turning point. That is exactly Malle, in there, striking again. Contrast, antagonism, emotions, brute emotions. The rest is craft and mastery. But emotions. That is what he aims for. That is what we get."