Gigi (1958)

Written by Alan Jay Lerner

Directed by Vincente Minnelli

It’s no surprise that I have a soft spot for musicals. They’re what I grew up on, so I’m (almost) always excited to see a new one. Gigi was a film that I was excited to see when I read over this list for the first time, as I was unfamiliar with it, knowing only that it was a musical. As I prepared to watch it, I saw that it was written by the same composers as My Fair Lady, another film coming up on this list, and one that I know and enjoy, as it’s one of my dad’s favorite shows.

Gigi wasn’t bad. There were great things about it. Still, there’s something about it that just didn’t connect for me.

Leslie Caron as Gigi

Gigi tells the story of...Gigi...a young girl in France, being trained as a courtesan (but not in the Moulin Rouge-y way). She’s friends with a handsome bachelor who always has a new girl on his arm. I think we ALL know how this ends up.

Musically, the film was fine...it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t astounding, either. It didn’t feel like it had a lot of musical variety, sort of like Victor/Victoria (which also suffers the same problem). The film’s songs also start to feel very similar to My Fair Lady; for example, take this film’s ‘Gaston’s Soliloquy’, and compare it to Lady’s ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’: it’s the exact same idea, phrased the same way, and even musically sounds nearly identical! This film came out after the show My Fair Lady (but before the film), and just comes across as slightly derivative. I will admit there was one particularly stand-out number, ‘It’s a Bore’, which felt fun and upbeat after the lackluster opening number.

This film is certainly opulent

Like An American in Paris, the film takes care to relish its setting, and the film does look gorgeous (the sitting room of Gigi’s flat is A LOT of red). Besides some obvious rear-projection shots, the film shoots on location quite a bit, and tries to capture the beauty of Paris. The cinematography is adequate work, but I did enjoy the stroke of genius behind the staging of ‘She is Not Thinking of Me’, in which Louis Jourdan’s Gaston realizes his date is not paying attention to him. The scene is filmed with almost the entire song being performed in voiceover, with Gaston reacting to the thoughts in his head. It’s a novel way (for the time) to express those emotions, and it made me think of a much more recent Best Picture winner, Chicago.

Louis Jourdan as Gaston and Leslie Caron as Gigi

The performances in the film are fine, even if the characters are not. Firstly the two leads, Gigi and Gaston, need to stop listening to what others tell them to do and to just listen to their own hearts and minds. On that note, the older people in this film are just...terrible. They have terrible motives, they give terrible advice, and they seem to exist to simply be roadblocks in the plot. They don’t do anything to advance the plot in any positive way (I feel like there’s a Baby Boomer comparison to be made here somewhere, but let’s just leave it at that). Lastly, Gaston’s CONSTANT yo-yo-ing between affection and disgust with Gigi becomes aggravating by the film’s end, because he really just needs to make a decision and stick with it because this movie needs to wrap up.

As I mentioned, it’s not a bad movie. I’m glad I saw it, and there are some really cute bits in it. But knowing that the superior My Fair Lady is just a few films away, I think, stopped me from really engaging with this film. The composers have already covered this sort of story, and better, before this.

FINAL GRADE: B-