How grand it would be to live in Paris in the 1890s with no responsibilities, no job and to only be concerned with gossip, parties, “love making”, winning gems as party favors from royalty and wondering what to lavish piles of money on.
Such concerns define the society in “Gigi,” a stuffy, expensive-looking, pleasantly inconsequential Old Hollywood musical. The film is named for its spritely, bouncy and immature title girl Gigi (Leslie Caron), a name only correctly pronounced when done with an overstated French lisp (“Zhee-Zhee!”), but it’s actually the story of the stiff, stuck-up, rich grump Gaston (Louis Jourdan). Gaston is a playboy unimpressed with anything this life can offer, be it the garish parties and bourgeois lifestyle or the beauty to be found in nature.
“It’s a bore!” he asserts time and again in one of the film’s more grating songs. “The world is round, but everything in it is flat,” he says in an example of how the film dashes in intellectual prose amid the coquetry and scandalous whispering.
Gaston is family friends with Gigi and her grandmother Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold), but when he realizes that he enjoys lazing about and playing cards with this giddy kid more than he does sleeping with Eva Gabor, their relationship soon becomes more than platonic. When her grandmother realizes this, she and the notoriously posh Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) school Gigi in exaggerated etiquette lessons designed to drain Gigi of her excitable personality and integrate her into the more decadent and old fashioned society.
The film is about the deterioration of this golden age, becoming disillusioned with the form and tradition of the old establishment while giving into the carefree notions of love and playfulness free of gossip or social norms. But Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay lacks any sort of nuance that may depict the similar story found in Lerner’s “My Fair Lady.”
Although Leslie Caron is charming and adorable in a way that Audrey Hepburn would perfect, she’s oddly pushed to the background here and the movie allows her only to be perky. Her one song that she gets is a goofy number reflecting the worst qualities of Old Hollywood musicals in which lyrics substitute in for thought and plot. “I don’t understand Parisians,” she pout sings.
Caron made her name in the movies after starring alongside Gene Kelly in “An American in Paris.” That film was also directed by Vincente Minnelli and written by Lerner, it also won Best Picture, was also set in Paris and was also a colorful musical. But that film felt modern and wittier, it had dancing and was more visually stimulating given Kelly’s helpful eye.
“Gigi” feels clunky in comparison. It trots out the Cinemascope aspect ratio but offers only wide set dressing and a few statuettes to serve as a backdrop. Minnelli shoots behind tables and sofas inside parlors and doesn’t allow the camera to move elegantly or edit with vitality.
“Gigi” won more Oscars than any film before it, breaking “Gone With the Wind’s” record by winning nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Minnelli’s only Best Director prize. It was a massive hit for MGM in an age when movie musicals were at their peak. Today it feels quaint, cheesy and soapy, but like all Old Hollywood movies, it has a disarming charm that eventually wins you over.