Amid a candy-colored, soundstage seaside village, radiantly beautiful young lovers Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve in a star-is-born performance) and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) look forward to a lifetime of happiness together. Then she gets pregnant, he is shipped off to fight in Algeria, and the months gradually turn into years… As pretty as a box of macarons and sung entirely to the lilting, light-as-meringue melodies of Michel Legrand, Jacques Demy’s enchanting cine-opera is both a triumph of art direction—think MGM’s Freed Unit gone pastel mad—and an ineffably tender and touching fable about the ways in which youthful idealism must reckon with the realities of life.