“Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort is undoubtedly too much. Here is romantic intrigue served up with a knowing lack of shame, a musical boasting star power of the highest magnitude that satirizes the conventions of the movie musical with affection and wicked glee. Here are also Michel Legrand's finest songs, Catherine Deneuve's most extroverted performance and Gene Kelly's sweetest one. Demy and Legrand set out to celebrate the Hollywood musical, but they ended up outclassing the original.

To have this happiest of all products of the French New Wave, originally released in 1967, restored uncut to its original wide-screen splendor must count as a major event. If ever there was a perfect film musical, this has to be it. The action is fast, the plot intricate. Deneuve and her real-life sister Francoise Dorleac play twin sisters in a sunny seaside town who long for life and love in the big city.

The formidable Danielle Darrieux plays the unapologetically single mom who raised the pair and now runs a little cafe in Rochefort's main square. There, the large passing cast includes Jacques Perrin as a young sailor pining for the perfect woman, Michel Piccoli as an older musician looking for a long-lost lover and Kelly as his American friend. Add George Chakiris and Grover Dale as a pair of dancing truck drivers with a traveling carnival, and the stage is set for a weekend none of them will ever forget.

It is easy to love Demy's Young Girls on its own terms. But it grows more lovable in the light of the Hollywood musicals the director celebrates. The prologue begins in stillness, with a crane shot of carnival workers on a ferry about to dock in Rochefort. Suddenly, inevitably, they break into dance. It is much like the beginning of Jerome Robbins' West Side Story – and the association is easy to make, given that Demy's lead dancer is Chakiris, who'd won an Oscar for West Side Story five years earlier.

The subject of Demy's original script may be soaked in familiar MGM and Fox musical lore, but the actual lyrics, which Demy also wrote, consist mostly of very French alexandrines. These rhymed hexameters make for fine syncopation when set to music by Legrand. Demy died in 1990, and his finest picture now has been lovingly restored by Agnes Varda, his widow, who has a brief cameo in Young Girls as a music-loving nun. Young Girls stands alone from Demy's other films as a gift of optimism, tenderness and hope. It is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful films of all time. — Octavio Roca, San Francisco Chronicle