Gigi

I’ve spent much of my life not liking Gigi. To be more precise, I was disgusted by the men’s attitudes and infuriated with the women’s behavior. In the Most Hated Musicals Thread, I wrote, “With her grandmother and aunt's help up the steps, Gigi laid herself on the altar of second class citizenship. She had the chance to be formidable, but blew it.” I kind of resented her for caving and had similar reactions to the endings of Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Annie Get Your Gun. Where’s the conviction? Where are the strong women role models? After watching the film again last week, I softened my feelings towards the grandmother. I hadn’t noticed how she had tried to inform Gigi about what she was getting herself into. A weak attempt maybe, but for someone who knew no other life pursuit, the grandmother did make an effort. Besides my overwhelming distaste for Gigi’s reversal decision, I found the story and music to be, for the most part, a bore.  There was little forward movement and the songs, though luckily shorter than song renditions in Kiss Me Kate, were uninteresting or worse, creepy.

Enter Dual Focus Narrative. My textbook for the semester is Rick Altman’s The American Film Musical, a wordy treatise on the theory of genre analysis. With the Dual Focus concept, he managed to turn on a light bulb over my head and walk me through a movie that I thought I had seen and understood, and said, “Forget everything you think you know and look at this from a different standpoint.” I’d become comfortable with the protagonist driven story and expected to follow along as plot points begat plot points. Sometimes I complained about the predictability, but I still liked the linear style.

The idea of parallelism as a “different principle of organization” was something I hadn’t really considered before, but I was intrigued, and by the end of the chapter Altman had sold me on the concept. Vincente Minnelli wasn’t wandering around haphazardly, fitting in songs willy-nilly. The scenes were very precisely choreographed to mirror Gaston and Gigi’s experiences and the montage scenes took on elevated meaning as they illustrated their similar predicaments. With the male/female, wealthy/beautiful, child/adult dichotomies all explored, the film turned into a much more interesting piece. I had dismissed it because of my convictions, but I had missed out because of my ignorance.

Dual Focus Narrative opens up a whole new way of looking at a film as psychology, sociology, history and ethics come into play while two characters slowly make their way to reconciliation. Even though I still don't like Gigi, I'm now aware that there is more to it than I had given it credit for.