|
|
|
Newest Reviews: New Movies - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Old Movies - Touki Bouki: The Journey of the Hyena The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Archives - Recap: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 , 2005, 2006, 2007 , 2008 , 2009 , 2010 , 2011 , 2012
|
Gigi (Vincente Minnelli) 1958
* * 1/2 06-20-02 Jeremy Heilman
|
The rally cry of Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jordan), the very
eligible Parisian bachelor who sits at the center of Gigi is, “It’s a bore,” and though I can’t really say that
his worldview adequately describes the experience of watching the film, it’s
not as far from the truth as the reputation of this ten time Oscar winner might
lead you to believe. It’s definitely a lesser film than An American in Paris, another Minnelli-directed musical that also
won a Best Picture Oscar, and it pales in comparison to My Fair Lady, which shares its writers. The production design is as
lavishly detailed as it is in any other MGM musical of the era, but many of the
other pleasures that one would expect to find in a Hollywood musical are missing
here. There’s next to no dancing, and most of the songs are delivered by a
single character who remains framed in the center of a static 'Scope medium shot. Even in the group
numbers, the arrangements of the actors feels less like choreography than overly
fussy mise-en-scene. Worst of all are the phony, overly nasal French accents
that the cast adopts whenever they speak (in English).
It doesn’t help matters much that this tale of a sixteen
year old’s courtship is framed by the creepy narration of Maurice Chevalier,
an ancient Frenchman, who adds seediness to the proceedings by singing, “Thank
Heaven For Little Girls.” It’s nauseating, especially given the brightly
colored backdrop that it’s delivered in, and it has the effect of making you
glad that the story is as sugar coated as it is. Still, there remains a spoonful
of cynicism throughout that makes the confectionary romance that the movie wants
to recount a bit tough to swallow, but the film doesn’t exactly work as a
satire of Paris’s amorous flippancy either. The lampoon is buried here under a
heap of overly gussied art direction that seems to endorse the satirized
lifestyle by making it beautiful. The overly sentimental nature of the film and
the refusal to ever present its titular character as an object worthy of
ridicule only worsen matters. There are occasional flashes of wit that suggest
what Gigi might have been if it were
made a bit less conservatively (and more faithfully to its Colette-penned source
material), and they’re always funnier than what surrounds them. Though there
are several good performances here, they seem suffocated. Other films set in
turn-of-the-century Paris show a much spunkier version of the city, making me
think that this time Hollywood’s chastity beat out cultural accuracy.