Of all the movies I've seen, "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is still one of the strangest. I'm a classical music person, but a pop-opera-movie is still a reach for me. Legrand's music is quite wonderful at times, but even after 45 years, I have trouble assimilating the whole idea.
Legrand's classical background let him hit the jackpot in 1967 when he stole the second movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola in E-flat and turned it into "The Windmills of Your Mind". All that work at the conservatory paid off.
The movie was a part of a romantic trilogy, it comes after Lola (1961) and before The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). ;D