On Further Review: Gigi
I had seen Gigi (1958) three times before sitting down to watch it again last night. Producer Arthur Freed and director Vincente Minnelli’s grand MGM musical, written by Lerner & Loewe (My Fair Lady), certainly isn’t the greatest movie musical of all-time. But it is highly entertaining with grade A production values. Watching it again, I experienced many of the same emotions that I had in my previous viewings. The elation that comes every time I see Gigi (Leslie Caron), Gaston (Louis Jourdan), and Mamita (Hermione Gingold) break into “The Night They Invented Champagne.” The shared feeling of nostalgia from listening to Honoré (Maurice Chevalier) and Mamita sing “I Remember it Well.” The delight as you realize Gaston is falling for Gigi not as a courtesan in training, but as a spirited, unaffected Parisian girl. The charm of Paris in 1900. The vibrant colors. It was all there.
On this viewing, my first in nearly 10 years, I discovered something new. As Gaston asks Mamita for Gigi’s hand in marriage, there was an atmosphere not usually associated with the finale of a Freed musical. It was uncertainty.
Uncertainty? From the movie that a 1958 review in Variety called, “A naughty but nice romp of the hyper-romantic naughty 90s of Paris-in-the-spring, in the Bois, in Maxim’s, and in the boudoir.” No, it wasn’t a happily-ever-after Cinderella story ending as I remembered it. This time I saw a conflicted young man who is in love with someone who doesn’t fully exist anymore. I saw a 16-year-old girl, not as a young woman growing into the beautiful swan like the ones swimming behind Gaston as he sings about the girl-turned-woman, but instead as a teenage courtesan-in-training who becomes exactly what she tried not to be.
In the final moments of the film, Gaston discovers that Gigi is no longer the awkward and carefree girl he knew. He has already taken this redesigned Gigi out to Maxim’s where she behaves just like the women that he called “bores.” Their evening out means that she has been presented to the public. Leaving her, as he is inclined to do, would damage her future prospects. What king or maharajah would want this very well-known playboy’s leftovers?
Gaston has no choice. He must marry her. The look on his face as he makes this decision is hardly that of a handsome prince finally able to embrace the woman that he’s longed to make his princess. Instead, it’s the face of a man who believes he has no other option, for her sake and for his. Had Gaston not asked her to marry him, this girl, who decided to fit the mold if only to impress the man she loves, would have become his Ophelia.
Most viewers today watch Gigi and are disgusted because they equate the story to a musical justification for pedophilia. People don’t find it any easier to watch a 16-year-old (even one played by the 27-year-old Caron) trained to be an mistress for the world’s elite.
Other viewers today more appropriately criticize the film because it stands in My Fair Lady‘s shadow. The 1964 Oscar-winning Lerner & Loewe musical, which is easily one of the greatest movie musicals of all-time, was adapted to the screen six years after Gigi was released. Compared to that musical Pygmalion story, Gigi suffers not from a failed attempt at grand-scale musical filmmaking, but rather from a lack of a sweep-you-off-your-feet romance.
Gigi may try to be a love story, but it has an ominous ending. There’s one final shot of Gaston and Gigi walking in a Paris park before boarding a carriage. Gigi is dressed in a lavender dress with matching hat and boa. Gaston is looking as dapper as always. They stroll along as if they are just another Parisian couple. The entirety of the movie—Gaston’s interactions with Gigi’s much less affluent family and Gigi’s attempts to reject her training—don’t allow me to believe this couple is eager to behave like the others. At this point, I’m not positive Gaston realizes that his companion still has a little Gigi in her. And like Gigi, the film’s glamorous exterior was repressing something too daring for contemporaries to accept. The only option is to hide it far below the surface, hoping that someday someone notices.
Will Gaston? Will you?
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