Welcome to My Fair Lady’s little sister Gigi – a movie about training a female ingénue to ensnare the attention of a man of good breeding in order to prove their teacher’s techniques effective.
Age gaps in Hollywood castings have always been common, but thankfully, *I think*, we’re starting to outgrow the trope of a young child becoming some old man’s romantic love interest. At least until someone misinterprets and remakes Lolita for the 100th time, then we’re all fucked. Leslie Caron rallied for this role – MGM approached her for ideas for her next project, and she chose this. Audrey Hepburn was playing Gigi in the Broadway show at the time, and you can see Audrey’s influence all over Leslie’s performance, down to her suspiciously similar accent.
Picture it: Paris in the 1900s. Honoré Lachaille is a geriatric serial dater with simple tastes – in his spare time he likes to ogle little girls in the park while fantasizing about which ones will marry or remain unmarried, as those are the only two roles woman can assume. His former lover’s granddaughter, Gigi, is quickly coming “of age”, even though she is dressed exactly like Madeline in the first few scenes of this movie. She attends weekly lessons conducted by her Great-Aunt Alicia on how to get a man to chuck money in her direction. Gigi doesn’t take much of an interest in the whole affair of becoming a courtesan, as she finds what her Aunt calls “love” ridiculous. Possibly because Gigi’s a literal child, or because she doesn’t find a future of being a mistress all that particularly safe or meaningful. Her Aunt shows her things like how to appraise jewelry, light a cigar, and how to choke down a small bird without picking out the bones, which I can’t decide is a purposeful metaphor for swallowing or not.
“Instead of getting married at once, we get married at last,” is kind of empowering if you don’t think about the fact these women were auctioned off to some dude who “didn’t mind” buying the equivalent of what they viewed as a used car with 200k miles on it.
Meanwhile, Honoré’s nephew Gaston complains to his uncle that the constant string of parties he’s been attending with his new mistress have him bored and exhausted. Honoré tries to convince Gaston to attend a luncheon by talking through a song like the Henry Higgins surrogate that he is. Gaston abandons this plan and laments he’d rather visit Gigi’s grandmother Madame Alvarez, as he enjoys slumming it with the commoners instead of having to pretend he enjoys conversation with rich folk.
NO ONE COMPLAINS LIKE GASTON, LIKES YOUNG DAMES LIKE GASTON; IN A CARRIAGE RIDE NO ONE CAN BE TAMED LIKE GASTON.
After abandoning his uncle, Gaston runs into Gigi, who is feeling defiant and similarly disinterested in her family’s expectations for her future. They go out to the Ice Palace to commiserate over drinks while Gaston muses if he had a little girl, he’d make sure she was more respectful than Gigi, and threatens to spank her. After Gigi spots Gaston’s current mistress Liane with a dashing ice skating instructor, she scatters off to leave the two of them alone.
Gaston couldn’t act more disinterested in his mistress’ daytime activities. Later that night, however, he realizes Liane’s good mood has nothing to do with his company, and instead is the result of thinking about her other, less connected boyfriend. This bothers Gaston for some unknown reason, perhaps because of wounded pride and not because he actually cares for this woman. Instead of breaking up with Liane over a letter or the phone like a coward, he’s coerced by his uncle to punish Liane by paying her lover to abandon her while simultaneously humiliating her in public by revealing the affair. She attempts to take her own life shortly afterwards, and Honoré revels in Gaston’s first assisted suicide attempt like a fucking psycho. He also talks Gaston out of hiding in the country to lick his wounds and convinces his nephew to hit the social scene even harder to show everyone how insensitive and unbothered Gaston is.
Gaston is quickly exhausted by his now unrelenting schedule as the weight of the world lies on the shoulders of a powerful, rich white man. Instead of attending a party held in his honor, he hides out at Madame Alvarez’s to drink and play cards with Gigi. After losing a bet, Gaston spanks Gigi and agrees to take both Gigi and her grandmother to the beach, much to the delight of them both.
During the vacation, Gaston humors Gigi by throwing her around in the ocean and showing how poorly he rides asses. His uncle, after an entire weekend of racking up rejections, barks up an old tree by hitting on Madame Alvarez. He pays her a compliment every woman wants to hear, by confessing he cheated on her because he wanted to marry her. She reminds him he has almost no recollection of their love affair and blows him off figuratively and not literally.
When the rumor of Gigi and Gaston’s familiar relationship reaches Great-Aunt Alicia, she insists Gigi should be set-up as Gaston’s mistress. Gaston is, at first, disgusted by the prospect, as he treats Gigi like a daughter and is hesitant to force her to grow up. After having a Clueless-level epiphany, he realizes he may be in love with his budding step-daughter and decides to accept Aunt Alicia and Madame Alvarez’s proposition. When Gaston asks Gigi to “go steady”, she reacts in horror and refuses his proposal, as she can’t imagine sleeping with her surrogate father until he decides to get sick of her and leave her for some other woman.
Everyone freaks out, including Gaston, who confides in his oblivious uncle. Honoré tells Gaston he’ll find someone else and then pretends he is relieved he doesn’t have to deal with heartache because he’s old.
Eventually Gigi reluctantly accepts the agreement because she’d rather be miserable with Gaston than miserable without him. She legitimately says this, I’m not joking for once. This is grim.
The night before her first outing with Gaston, Gigi prays to god to protect her heart and I just want to vomit. Much like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Leslie Caron’s voice was clearly dubbed by Betty Wand for this particular song (even though Leslie recorded it) and it is glaringly obvious and distracting.
Eliza Doolittle plays her part perfectly during their dinner, and as the night progresses, Gaston becomes more and more irritated at the thought of Gigi having to play the part of the perfect courtesan to him while receiving judgement from his society friends. He throws a tantrum and drags Gigi out of the building, leaving her to wonder what she did wrong and lament about her fate as a failed mistress. After huffing around about town, Gaston returns to Gigi’s home to propose marriage, as he wants to protect her from the life of a hooker. How romantic.
It’s very interesting that not *once* in this movie is it explicitly stated that Gigi is training to be a courtesan-for-hire, or that her grandmother and aunt were former courtesans. The first time I watched this movie as a young, naïve girl, I was so perplexed as to why marrying Gigi was called a “business matter”, why it involved contract negotiations with lawyers, and why Gigi was so afraid Gaston would eventually leave her. Watching this an adult, it made a lot more sense why Gigi was fairly terrified to “date” Gaston because she was losing a friend and being forced to enter into a stigmatized life she had no interest in.
It causes me equal parts disgust and relief to realize Gigi and Gaston are victims of their circumstances and have to be coerced into dating each other. Gaston, while being a dumb playboy, seems to be a decent dude who treated Gigi like a daughter because he genuinely had that sort of affection for her, and not because he intended on grooming her into being his child bride. Gigi has almost no options and is extremely reluctant to take Gaston as her lover because she’s embarrassed to be in the position of being sold to her friend. They married each other as protection against society, and in my head canon, they remained lifelong friends while doing whatever the fuck they wanted outside of the marriage with other people they actually consider as romantic prospects.
As for the musical numbers, I find them fairly forgettable. A lot of them only harken to their My Fair Lady counterparts and don’t add a whole lot to the story in general. And let me tell you, by the end I was wholly annoyed that not one man in this film could get through a number without sing-talking through it. It’s manly to sing, I promise you, try it sometime.
The acting performances from this excellent cast was the only thing that got me through this. Simple looks from Madame Alvarez made me giggle. But for what is lauded as the last “good” movie musical made by MGM, to me, it left a lot to be desired.