One of the curiosities of this film lies in its irregular use of colours. They give the film its rhythm, offering an unusual palette: a pop lightness and an artistic commitment to a period of formal inventiveness. The filmmaker tells the same funny and sad stories of romantic encounters that had already formed the basis of Adieu Philippine and Blue Jeans. He might make fun of his naive characters, but above all we see the beauty, tenderness and fragility of a look. Thus, he puts Buster Keaton’s burlesque together with Douglas Sirk’s colourful and luminous melancholy and presents three stories told by three girls, all pondering their romantic dilemmas. Playing on the letters that appeared in women’s magazines of the time, Jacques Rozier gives outrageous answers to absurd questions, using offbeat digressions as a pretext to keep the bodies of his actors in endless movement, to break an established rhythm and to challenge his own cinema in order to continue its evolution. The real questions Jacques Rozier was asking himself were questions of form, colour and rhythm. When the Cinémathèque française discovered the negatives of Roméos et Jupettes, they enlisted the aid of production company Argos Film to make a 35mm version, from which a digital restoration could then be produced. As we have no original 35mm version, this new copy will be vital to the faithful reproduction of the film’s colours as they were upon its release in the 1960s. The Cinémathèque asked Willy Kurant, the director of photography for Roméos et Jupettes, to verify the color correction carried out by José Saraiva at Hiventy, the last commercial laboratory in France that still uses traditional methods for photochemical development and printing.

Hervé Pichard