Trivia

Demy's longtime collaborator, composer Michel Legrand, strongly opposed the movie's social themes and urged the director to not do the movie. He ended up not being associated with the movie at all, and even in the 2010s, he was still trashing the movie in interviews.

While it's not obvious to modern audiences, the opening shot with the transporter bridge is actually a special effect, as Nantes' famous transporter bridge was demolished in the late fifties. A picture of the bridge was put onto a glass frame, and the harbor was shot through the glass to give the impression that the bridge is still there.

The movie stayed in development hell for decades. In the fifties, it was originally envisioned as a novel, but Demy couldn't find a satisfying ending. He took another stab at it in the sixties (as a movie script now), where, for instance, Édith is a gay man attracted to Guilbaud. In the seventies, it's titled "Édith de Nantes" (Édith from/of Nantes, a play on the "Édit de Nantes", or the Edict of Nantes in English). Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu are asked to play the main parts, but they refused, as they didn't want to be dubbed when singing (which happened to Deneuve twice with Demy before, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)). Eventually, two months away from shooting, financing fell through, and Demy had to wait another decade until he could make his movie in the eighties with another producer, albeit with lesser-known actors.

The movie was applauded by critics but bombed at the box office, while Ace of Aces (1982), released on the same day, made a killing: they respectively sold 20,000 and 463,000 tickets during their first week. Several dozen French critics then started publicly promoting the movie, while not-so-subtly dissing the Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicle, saying "The movie to see today is A Room in Town (1982)" and criticizing the other movie's marketing costs, apparently not aware that Demy's picture benefited from a large promotion and distribution campaign. Belmondo himself replied via the press, annoyed that success was apparently something to be ashamed of, and stated that when Stavisky (1974), a movie he produced, bombed, he didn't blame James Bond [movies] for stealing his audience. Demy was reportedly very embarrassed about the whole situation, which contributed to make him look like a sore loser and removed from the mainstream audiences.

Like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) before it, the entire dialogue in the movie is sung, even the most basic dialogue lines like "Ça va ? - Ça va.".