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Not dancing about architecture but pirouetting about painting, the aesthete's joke adjusted for the City of Lights. "Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, give up and marry the boss' daughter." The GI turned aspiring artist (Gene Kelly) is a representational mediocrity in a land of impressionistic phantoms, his true virtuosity lies in hoofing in and out of bistros when seized by a romantic urge. (Chaplin is chief amid Kelly's modalities, explicitly cited in his "I Got Rhythm" soft-shoe with tickled street urchins.) Gamey patronage from the Baltimore heiress (Nina Foch), pushy wooing with the flexible gamine (Leslie Caron) who's engaged to his music-hall pal (Georges Guétary). "Don't you like criticism?" MGM sets make the ideal laboratory for the artificial evocation of artificial Gallic charm, Vincente Minnelli engineers the progression from postcards to canvases. Meticulous backdrops for Gershwin songs, "Our Love is Here to Stay" gets the Seine at night, mist and burnished streetlights to set off the bluish riverbank. Chorines like statuary adorn "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," with each purple step lighting up into an electric spiral. The vinegar in the champagne is Oscar Levant as the very embodiment of Valéry's bohemian-parasite, "underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character." (Méliès' L'Homme-Orchestre and Keaton's The Playhouse inform his solipsistic refractions.) Voyage autour de ma chambre in "Tra-La-La" ("To me you're fu-full of bla-bla-bla-bla"), nervous coffee and cigarettes in between twin grins in "S' Wonderful." The reflexive bravura of the ballet climax is the daydream of the harlequin who's seen The Red Shoes, tableaux jolted into motion suit the mingling of mediums in which the blazing pile-up of Renoir and Rousseau and Utrillo and Toulouse-Lautrec dissipates to Kelly in melancholy close-up. Minnelli recomposes the tale in Lust for Life five years later. Cinematography by John Alton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |