Jacques Demy's Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967)

For the vexing yet unmistakable triumph of this movie is that it somehow manages to be both more artificial and more realistic than we expect our musicals to be.
--Jonathan Rosenbaum on Les demoiselles de Rochefort.

I just missed Jacques Demy's film when it came out in 1967 (Andrew Sarris was one of the few critics who liked it) and then it disappeared for years.  It finally returned about ten years ago at the estimable Film Forum and is now available on DVD in an excellent print from Criterion.  It is a very French film, not only realistic and artificial but both pessimistic and optimistic, light and heavy.  Unlike Demy's glorious Les parapluies de Cherbourg this film includes a great deal of dancing, choreographed by Norman Maen.  There is dancing in the streets of Rochefort, pastel costumes and swooping camera movement, Gene Kelly and Catherine Deneuve, George Chakiris and Francoise Dorleac.  It is a film about hope and loss, missed connections and fate, love and despair. The music by Michel Legrand is lovely and the dancing and choreography expressive of the exuberance of those in small towns who want to go to Paris.

I like musicals with lots of dancing and all the movement in Les demoiselles is choreographed by Maen (who mainly worked in television) and directed by Demy, who also wrote the lyrics for the songs. There is even an appreciation for ballet and classical music, as Deneuve and Dorleac run a ballet school and Gene Kelly plays a classical composer.  There are schoolchildren and older men (one of whom turns out to be an axe murderer) and an older woman who runs a café (played by Danielle Darrieux, the only cast member who does her own singing).  There is much happiness, a great deal of melancholy and considerable optimism about the future.