Plot Intro
Paris, 1900. A young ingenue, Gigi (Leslie Caron), is being brought up by her Grandmother (Hermione Gingold) and Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) to be a regal, refined, elegant lady about town, complete with skills in dining, jewels and appropriate behaviour. Unfortunately, Gigi is energetic, clumsy and prefers silliness to society. Meanwhile, rich, handsome bachelor Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jourdan) is bored with Parisian society. Inevitably, the two find solace in each other and begin to fall in love…
Gigi is a film about the young against the old, making it very much a film of its time. The older characters in the film are obsessed with the antique Parisian style of romance- the beautiful, picturesque, chaste sort of romance one finds in Renaissance paintings. Unfortunately, there’s no soul, sense of humour or sex to it, so the two youthful lovers, who would rather jump around the sea or get sloshed on champagne together, find themselves in contention with their morally dignified elders. At this point in our journey through the Oscars, it’s 1958, and Elvis Presley’s pelvic gyrations were shocking the old and enflaming the young. As such, a film about young people finding love in their own way, and shirking off the endless rules and confinements of their strict families could not have resonated more.
What we are also seeing is the early stages of the Hays Code becoming less relevant. This Code was enforced in Hollywood in the mid-30’s to restrict film-makers from showing too many sexual references and nudity. “Pre-Code” films such as The Broadway Melody and It Happened One Night are noticeably more naughty than the chastity and restraint of Rebecca and Mrs Miniver. The making of a musical adaptation of the 1944 novella, Gigi, was delayed due to the producer, Arthur Freed, battling the Hays Code, which forbade the presentation of courtesans and men with mistresses (it was just far too shocking for human eyes!) But the film got made, and Hitchcock’s sex-and-violence-studded Psycho was only two years away, so evidently the Code is slowly but surely going out of the window to be eventually replaced with the gritty reality of the '70s films.
But less of such historical nonsense! Do I like Gigi? Not really, I’m afraid to say. It meanders a little blindly between a satire of Parisian society’s obsession with style over substance, and a slightly silly farce about men and women flirting with each other. It settles on neither and so both attempts at the genres are a bit weak for me. The songs are generally forgettable too. I like some big-belters or dance routines in a musical but we got neither. And the most well known song, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”, is basically an older gentleman singing about how lovely small girls are because they will grow into beautiful women. You might argue that this was innocent at the time but by today’s standards it’s just weird and creepy.
The film gains some points from me thanks to Leslie Caron’s spirited and fun performance in the title role. I wished that her lust for life and spiritedness was emphasised more (like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music) but she only gets a handful of funny lines and then works with whatever else she can pull from the inane script. There are splashes of humour in some short scenes where Gigi is trained by her Aunts and fails miserably, and when the Parisian upper classes gossip about each other. But again, these moments are too few and far between.
Gigi has moments of amusement but it’s a bit of a lame horse in a decade filled with spectacular and moving pieces. It needed the acrobatics of Gene Kelly or the ensemble scenes of West Side Story to give it more oomph.
Highlight
A French lady cheats on Gaston with an ice skater (gasp!) so Gaston pays the ice skater to leave Paris. We then cut to Aunt Alicia who states, “Madame d’Exelmans has committed suicide AGAIN!” which I thought was very funny.
Lowlight
The narrator of the tale, Gaston’s slightly pervy Uncle, gets a great deal of screen time but doesn’t do a lot to move the plot. Hardly “narrator” material.
Mark
3/10
The difficulty about this film is that it’s so forgettable that I can hardly remember any of it to actually discuss. And what there is to discuss, Paul has already gone into, above. It’s hard to believe this comes from the same decade as such a powerful and forward-thinking film as All About Eve, with discussions of courtesans and wives abounding throughout, and a generally xenophobic opinion that the French all cheat on each other.
Gigi herself is tolerable, a young woman who enjoys her life (a life which is described as impoverished despite her family’s constant serving of champagne to any guest who swings by), but Gaston, the ‘hero’ is hardly fleshed out and has a very repetitive song at the beginning about how he is bored, ironically boring us in the process. There’s a Rex Harrison-My-Fair-Lady feel to much of the singing, but without the required wit to carry us through and engage us.
The best things of this film come from the grandmother and great aunt Alicia, the latter of whom is a rich ex-courtesan who instructs Gigi in how to drink wine politely and walk around a room with the required finesse. It’s sterling work from Isabel Jeans who manages to turn most of her lines into comic punchlines and bring some vitality to this otherwise fairly limited film.
But for me the MVP was actually Gigi’s grandmother, played by Hermione Gingold. We’ve actually seen Gingold before, albeit in a tiny cameo in Around the World in Eighty Days, and it’s nice to see her actually flex her acting muscles here, and give probably the best performance in the film. It’s filled with nuance, and we see her gradual change from supporting Alicia to supporting Gigi - the old embracing the needs and views of the new. Not to mention her duet with her ex-lover (none other than Gaston’s slightly creepy uncle), where he mis-remembers all the elements of their affair and she snappily corrects him was my favourite song of the show.
It’s a slow moving film and once it gets going, it ends. But while nothing particularly happens, everything that does happen, happens too quickly. We find out that Gaston wants Gigi to be his mistress through a rapid little scene between Alicia and the grandmother which basically fills the audience in and doesn’t show us any of Gaston’s thought processes that got him to offer this deal. And while not enough time is spent on plot, too much is spent on music. The title (and might I add Oscar winning) song Gigi is dull, overlong and ultimately so forgettable that I started dozing off halfway through. Not a musical highlight of cinematic history.
It felt like an old-school musical, and knowing that we have the groundbreaking choreography of West Side Story, and the visual powerhouse that is The Sound of Music on the horizon, it’s more of a farewell nod to a rapidly vanishing style of cinema musicals, in a few years after Gigi, musicals will replace style with substance, and bring plot to the forefront - using the music not as aesthetically pleasing pauses, but as ways to drive the story forward.
Highlight
Hermione Gingold’s sharp put-downs during ‘I Remember It Well’, a song in which her ex-lover Honore Lachaille, forgets everything about their relationship, are great.
Lowlight
The film as a whole feels dusty and like a farewell to this old-school style of musicals. Bring on the groundbreakers I say.
Mark
2/10
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