How grand it would be to live in Paris in the 1890s with no responsibilities, no job and to only be concerned with gossip, parties, “love making”, winning gems as party favors from royalty and wondering what to lavish piles of money on.
Such concerns define the society in “Gigi,” a stuffy, expensive-looking, pleasantly inconsequential Old Hollywood musical. The film is named for its spritely, bouncy and immature title girl Gigi (Leslie Caron), a name only correctly pronounced when done with an overstated French lisp (“Zhee-Zhee!”), but it’s actually the story of the stiff, stuck-up, rich grump Gaston (Louis Jourdan). Gaston is a playboy unimpressed with anything this life can offer, be it the garish parties and bourgeois lifestyle or the beauty to be found in nature.
“It’s a bore!” he asserts time and again in one of the film’s more grating songs. “The world is round, but everything in it is flat,” he says in an example of how the film dashes in intellectual prose amid the coquetry and scandalous whispering.