![]() The Paris of An American in Paris is much more wholesome, if also spectacular. The Life of Emile Zola is set almost entirely in Paris, a place of superior achievement, the centre of the cultural world, with its own drama and internal dynamics which the audience is expected to recognise and relate to. I wrote previously that in both Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front, France is a place of wartime fascination and moral hazard, and the same is true for Casablanca, another war film. ![]() It’s not quite as in-your-face as the original – once again, Hollywood removes feminism from the text – but the fact that sex outside marriage is portrayed from the very beginning as a cheerfully accepted relationship choice is startling for 1958. ![]() The story is actually somewhat subversive of gender politics Gigi and her older relatives are navigating a world ruled by men, sure, but doing it at their own pace and according to their own rules the climax is where Gigi puts Gaston in the position where he must ask her grandmother for permission to marry her. Halfway through the will-they-or-won’t they plot, I found that I just didn’t care.As usual, starting with the bits I didn’t like so much, and as usual that list begins with whitewashing: there is not a single non-white face to be seen in the film, although Paris in 1899 was already pretty multi-ethnic ( Severiano de Heredia served as the equivalent of Mayor of Paris in 1879-80 and as a minister in the French government in 1887) and Paris in 1958, when the film was made, even more so.Īpart from that, there’s not a lot to dislike. ![]() I didn’t believe the romance between Gigi and Gaston because he spends so much time being cruel and dismissing her that their didn’t seem time for any real romantic sparks to ignite. Gigi is a movie that works in fits and starts, and actually only falls apart once the romance-or-courtesan plot comes into play. This is a long movie to sustain such a trite will-they-or-won’t-they plot. Where is her hand in the call of her own destiny? Why does she not protest it? Meanwhile Gaston (who can’t seem to go one scene without using the word ‘bore’) keeps getting frustrated and storming out the door and out of Gigi’s life only to return and profess his love. What worse, poor Gigi gets batted around this story like a tennis ball with no real agency. What exactly do they think they’re training her for? Prostitution? That’s unsettling for a lively musical. I realize that Aunt Alicia and Grandmama Alvarez want to turn Gigi into a lady fit for society, but what they are pushing her into comes off as socially-acceptable pimping. Lerner and Lowe were the best in the business and if their songs stayed in my head for almost two weeks then I can say that they did their jobs. It has been 10 days since I revisited the film and I find myself absentmindedly humming “The Night They Invented Champagne”, “I Remember It Well” and of course, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”. He, meanwhile, grows tired of the implications of being forced into Gigi’s arms and returns time and again for counsel with his elderly Uncle Honoré (Maurice Chevalier in a marvelous performance) who is in his 70s and just happy to be too old for such entanglements. Vincent Minnelli’s overstuffed, garish, Technicolor musical is a rather sponge-cleaned version of Collette’s work the story of a sweet young Parisian girl (Leslie Caron) in turn-of-the-century France who is groomed by her aunt and grandmother (Isabel Jeans and Hermione Gingold) to be a courtesan and ends up falling in love with Gaston (Louis Jourdan), a family friend. It might have been for the best that she never saw the finished product. not completely their own, Gigi was pried from a 1944 novella by French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette who wrote the story when she was in her 70s and didn’t live to see her work come to the screen. You really can’t blame MGM for trying to match the current Broadway smash “My Fair Lady” by coming up with a tale of love and lady-training all their own. Oscar’s 90 th birthday is just around the corner and to celebrate, every other day from now through March 4th, I will be taking a look at each and every film selected for his top award – the good, the bad and the sometimes not-so deserving.
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