When I saw the film as a girl myself, I had no idea that Gigi was being educated to be anything but a fine lady. It mandated “special care” in handling provocative subjects, including “the sale of women, or of women selling their virtue,” and “the deliberate seduction of girls.” “Any inference of sexual perversion” was strictly prohibited. Lerner and Loewe had to contend with the Motion Picture Production Code (widely known as the Hays Code), which was instituted in 1930. But reviving “Gigi” in 2015 is a challenge for another reason: the paradox that Americans are, more than fifty years on, after a revolution in mores, less prudish yet more moralistic than their parents. Minnelli’s movie and its actors were such perfect avatars that any adaptation will have to bear the comparison-from critics, if not from audiences of a new generation. Vanessa Hudgens, the twenty-six-year-old former Disney star in the title role, is, however, a dead ringer for Caron, and she is also the only Gigi to date who can really sing. The cast and its bustling energy, unlike those of previous productions, are all-American, and a certain sybaritic languor-the casual nihilism inherent to decadence-is lost in translation. And on April 8th, the latest “Gigi,” adapted by the British dramatist Heidi Thomas, a specialist in period television series, and directed by Eric Schaeffer, opens at the Neil Simon Theatre, on West Fifty-second Street. There was a tepid Broadway revival, based on the film, in 1973. (Colette had discovered the unknown Anglo-Dutch actress in Monte Carlo.) A French version of Loos’s script, translated by Colette herself, was performed, in Paris, in 1953, and has been revived periodically, most recently in 2013. Two years later, Anita Loos, fresh from her success with “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” turned “Gigi” into a hit play on Broadway and in London, with Audrey Hepburn, at her most gamine, in the title role. Writing “Gigi” was her escape to a more lighthearted era-that of her own scandalous prime.Ī film based on the novella, in French, directed by Jacqueline Audry, appeared in 1949. She was crippled by arthritis and consumed with worry about money and provisions, and with anxiety for her Jewish third husband. The original novella was written in 1943 (one of the harshest years of the Occupation), when Colette was seventy. “Gigi,” a feline confection-silken and sly-has had, to date, at least seven. (A few years later, at nearly fifty, she would return the favor by seducing his sixteen-year-old son.) But then, being Colette, she added, “Women, too.” What makes “Gigi” so anomalous is its fairy-tale ending: a girl of lowly provenance, destined for a life of high-class prostitution, followed, if she hasn’t been savvy, by a fate like her mother’s-obscure penury in middle age-finds a safe harbor in the form of a desirable husband.Ĭolette was a famous cat lover, and cats, as one knows, have nine lives. “Men are terrible,” she wrote to a friend in the midst of a torrid affair with the unfaithful man who became her second husband. If the writer was an eternal pessimist about love, the woman was an eternal sucker for it. Here the implacable old master (an indifferent mother to her own child) dotes maternally on her characters: the spunky ingénue of the title her great-aunt, Alicia, and grandmother, Mamita, retired courtesans who are grooming Gigi for the family trade and the wealthy libertine Gaston Lachaille, who discovers, in Gigi’s company, that he has something elusive to nearly all of Colette’s men: a heart. “Gigi” is set in the demimonde of the last fin de siècle, a milieu Colette often revisited, most notably in her masterpiece, “Cheri.” But the bleak erotic wisdom that suffuses most of her writing is filtered, in “Gigi,” through a gauze of nostalgia for quaint French naughtiness. Ironically, she is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of a single novella-“Gigi”-written during the Second World War, which is unique in her oeuvre precisely for the mellowness that makes it so popular. Colette started writing in her early twenties, and by the time she died, in 1954, at the age of eighty-one, she had published nearly eighty works: fiction, memoir, essays, drama, and collected journalism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |