In a fascinating, if theory-heavy, article in the latest issue of the Bright Lights Film Journal, Kevin L. Ferguson poses a question that we're pretty sure has never occurred to anyone else: why isn't there more wallpaper in movies?  After all, he says, "Wallpaper is a cut-rate imitation of reality based on an equation of repetition and pattern, but so is Hollywood."  Ferguson speculates that audiences know that "two fakes don't make a real", and that wallpaper, being detailed, time-consuming and expensive, makes the filmic world more real, and necessitates that every part of the frame becomes important -- a sacrifice many viewers aren't willing to make.  While contrasting the importance, both descriptive and symbolic, of wallpaper in literature with its near-invisibility in film, Ferguson cites a handful of movies where wallpaper was an important element -- among them early Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy shorts, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, My Fair Lady and the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races.  It's an interesting read, but we have to ask:  why no Barton Fink?

When I first saw Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg about ten years ago, I was blown away. So much about the movie transfixed me — the glorious Michel Legrand song score, the candy-colored visuals, and of course Catherine Deneuve as Genevieve, the picture-perfect embodiment of innocence, and later, of innocence lost. But one aspect of the film I wasn’t sure of was the jewelry salesman Roland Cassard, played by Marc Michel. After Genevieve’s boyfriend Guy is drafted to fight in Algeria and Genevieve discovers she’s pregnant with his child, Roland proposes marriage to her despite her pregnancy, and after some pressure from her mother she eventually accepts.

One moment involving Roland that I’ve always loved comes when he first asks Genevieve’s mother for her daughter’s hand. As Roland sings a song about his first love, Lola, who spurned him for another man, Demy cuts to a shot in which the camera dollies around a promenade with a balcony. The first time I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I assumed it was a stand-alone story, and so I interpreted this shot simply as a poetic image to accompany the story Roland tells.

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