Gigi
This review is a part of the Best Picture Project: a review of every single Academy Award winner for the Best Picture category. Gigi is the thirty first Best Picture winner at the 1958 Academy Awards.
Was awarding Cat on a Hot Tin Roof too much to ask for? What about The Defiant Ones? Well, get ready. We got another Best Picture dud here; this time in the form of Vincente Minnelli’s far-from-his-best musical Gigi. Compared to the lovelier (yet just as safe) An American in Paris, Gigi is boring, and incredibly superficial. Compared to My Fair Lady (both Best Picture winners cut from the same Pygmalion cloth), Gigi is lazy and misguided. With all of that being said, let me try and explain how Gigi won its prize (Correction: prizes. It won nine freaking Academy Awards, and set the record for a year).
Gigi is a light, crowd pleasing musical about a rich French socialite and his friendship-turned-relationship with a courtesan. Much of the film is through a male gaze, and we see that from the very beginning: we jump right into the ogling and judging of appearances right away. In fact, much of the film is about the reception of one’s graces and visual demeanors (as in how a crowd silences when they stare at you walking into a room). Gigi exhibits some interesting tricks for its time to try and sell these moments; the crowd being silence has all of its diegetic sound removed in an intentionally obvious way, for example.
Leslie Caron worked with Minnelli again, this time as the lead character.
Aside from those artistic instances, I don’t particularly care for Gigi. Okay, let’s toss in the wonderful songs and the vibrant costumes and sets. Now I don’t care for Gigi. So much time feels wasted on an unlikeable series of male characters, who seem like shallow animals by 2019. Gigi herself is not written to be entirely captivating, either, as if all of her traits were to serve as reasons why she was sought after. As an entertainment piece, I can imagine Gigi sweeping viewers of their feet. Don’t be the extras of this movie and stop just at how the film looks. Dig deeper. You’ll come to realize that Gigi is insensitively fluffy, to the point of being drab.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.