Trivia / The Young Girls of Rochefort

• Billing Displacement: One English-language DVD cover displaces Françoise Dorléac in favor of billing Gene Kelly alongside Catherine Deneuve. This can be explained by the fact that Kelly and Deneuve are legends while Dorléac had a short career for tragic reasons. The Criterion releases rectify this, however.
• Colbert Bump: The popularity and success of La La Land, which was heavily influenced by this film and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, sparked renewed interest in Jacques Demy. Notable in that the Criterion releases of Rochefort and Cherbourg were reissued in 2017, some time after La La Land released.
• Fake Nationality: Ètienne and Bill are played by American actors George Chakiris and Grover Dale.
• Faux Fluency: None of the American actors knew French, and as such, had to learn their lines phonetically. Save for Gene Kelly, all of their voices were dubbed over by French actors.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Not this film proper, but there was an English dub that was shot concurrently with the French version, though only the musical numbers were shot in both languages. This was the version originally released in the US, though it was not commercially successful. To date, it has never been officially released on home media. The only clips that show its existence are dubs of the sisters' and mother's songs and behind the scenes footage from Agnès Varda's documentary. A full soundtrack for this version was also released, but is extremely rare.
• Non-Singing Voice: Danielle Darrieux was the only performer in the film to do her own singing; every other performer was dubbed in the musical numbers. In Gene Kelly's case, although he spoke reasonably fluent French, Michel Legrand recalled later that his tessitura (the strongest part of his singing voice) only spanned an octave, even when he was singing in English; although that's really Kelly we hear speaking French, for singing French, he was dubbed into American-accented French by Canadian singer Donald Burke.
• Real-Life Relative: Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac really are sisters, but not twins (Françoise was one year and seven months older than Catherine).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Would you believe that Jacques Demy's first choice for playing the sisters was Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn?
  • Demy originally planned to cast Nino Castelnuovo, who'd played the lead in his previous film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, as Bill, but was forced to rewrite the script when he proved unavailable.

---