Chapter 4 - More Than a Musical: Minnelli’s Gigi

Summary

A close look at Vincente Minnelli's musical film Gigi (1958) uncovers ambiguities making it difficult to decide, especially today, if the movie is 1) celebrating incestuous/incestual desire or 2) enabling reflection on such a troubling phenomenon via the characters’ attempts to cope with it, as in Colette's novel. In this chapter, I examine this difficulty and consider how Minnelli's direction adapts Colette's vision.

His superb popular film introduced many Americans to Colette's name. Alan Jay Lerner's screenplay and lyrics, along with Frederick Loewe's music shape thought-provoking performances by Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan with Maurice Chevalier adding dangerous charm. This version is upbeat, a Pygmalion operetta in which narrative, romance, and comedy resemble elements in Lerner and Loewe's Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, of two years before, but its engagement with the incest taboo makes it different and worth more attention than paid until now.

Seeming a less complex novel than Colette's others, Gigi in fact raises important and tough questions about an amorous relationship between “parent” and “child,” as my preceding chapter shows. While psychoanalytic critics credit Julia Kristeva, along with other French feminists, with shifting the focus from a male-centered psychology to one more cognizant of the female, her theories and literary criticism in fact also bring new light to psychological formations in both sexes, as I will explain in this analysis of Minnelli's film and its unconscious subtext.

Focusing on the young Gigi and the father figure Gaston from Colette's novel, including its “happy” ending, the film also adds a character absent from it, Gaston's uncle, Honoré. He is Anita Loos's invention in her 1951 Broadway production based on the novel. Played by Chevalier, the addition has a significant impact on the movie's contradictory messages.

Minnelli uses Honoré to frame the narrative in a way that celebrates womanizing with emphasis on the love object before she matures. Such a beginning makes one uneasy over the suggestions of incestual relations. The latter, as explained in my Introduction , engages individuals who play the role of child and parent without being related biologically. Biology does connect them in the more commonly used term “incestuous.”