Gigi

Sem's Belle Époque illustrations adorn the credits, and there's the Bois de Boulogne of the Impressionists repainted in Metrocolor. "The future" ca. 1900 is a carefree adolescent (Leslie Caron) in the process of having innocence ironed out of her, noting an emerald's blue glow and munching on an ortolan's bones are integral to a courtesan's education. ("Bad table manners have broken up more households than infidelity," proclaims Isabel Jeans as the grooming aunt.) "I don't understand the Parisians," a vexed schoolgirl's view of the romantic idée fixe, the high-society stick (Louis Jourdan) is just as unimpressed with the Eiffel Tower and the Seine, "it's a bore" is his byword. They belong together, the question is whether it will be love or an "arrangement." "Victor Hugo couldn't pull it off!" Colette by way of Alan Jay Lerner, mounted by Vincente Minnelli to skim the glacéed surfaces of a stringent social order. One enters Maxim's to a chorus of gossipy murmurs, règle du jeu, a woman swallowing poison in the face of scandal is a Lothario's triumph. "Congratulations, your first suicide. What an achievement!" The screen is a procession of candy-box tableaux, Minnelli stands uncharacteristically still until his camera curiously, sublimely tracks with dancing feet across Matisse's red room in "The Night They Invented Champagne." Introduced with an ode to nymphets, the elderly roué (Maurice Chevalier) redeems himself with a tuneful acceptance of his own dotage: "The fountain of youth is dull as paint / Methuselah is my patron saint." (Chevalier's other great moment is "I Remember It Well" with Hermione Gingold, a reddening sunset for veteran lovers as well as for the studio artifice of the classical musical.) The climactic epiphany finds a top-hatted figure silhouetted by an illuminated fountain, "you always do things in the grand manner." Cukor builds on the labors (My Fair Lady), Malle interrogates them (Pretty Baby). Cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. With Eva Gabor, Jacques Bergerac, and John Abbott.