In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, more than in any of his earlier films, Jacques Demy fulfils that age-old dream of total, unmitigated creation that he was striving towards in his animation projects, and which he never renounced. The astounding innovation lies not in the subject itself… but in the formal approach to it, entirely based on notions of displacement.
For Demy, displacement means, for starters, choosing to have his characters use resolutely everyday dialogue entirely in song. Not to transform the film into an opera or a musical comedy with show tunes (in which case there would no longer be any discrepancy, simply recourse to another type of well-established code), but to invent a novel form of vocal expression, intimately connected to the music, which nevertheless refuses to be assimilated into any other recognised model…
Displacement also means playing the game of classical mise-en-scène and subtly distorting it, transforming camera movements into understated choreographic sequences, giving the camera the status of a character, and at the same time making the audience forget its presence. Displacement means realising the old dream of parallel universes so dear to science fiction; inventing a world the traveller believes he recognises and yet, thanks to countless details, revealing it as different in nature from the familiar one he thought to have rediscovered.
Demy thus dreams of an all-encompassing cinema; a cinema of refined harmonies, whose direction, music, colours, actors, dialogue and sets all play an equal part in the production of meaning, without any of the elements ever taking precedence over the other, creating a purely cinematographic universe that could not exist anywhere else. More than any other, this cinema requires the complete control of a single creator. More than any other, it requires exceptional collaborators and actors, capable of blindly trusting the captain of a ship that is venturing into the unknown and guessing what he expects of them without being able to show them, because as yet no one has ever achieved it.

Jean-Pierre Berthomé, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Nathan, Paris 1995