This movie is terrible, misogynistic, and fetishizes young women. Ignoring the suspicious "Thank Heaven For Little Girls" tune that plays as the movie's theme with the winning line "Without them what would little boys do?", this movie portrays unhealthy relationship dynamics as normal and healthy. It also glorifies a suicide of one of the characters as exhilarating gossip and a cause for celebration. The main characters who begin the movie with a big brother-little sister relationship dynamic end up in a romantic relationship when the girl is only 16. Do. Not. See. This. Movie.

It was quite weird watching this movie knowing virtually nothing about it. All I knew (or at least all I could remember) is that this movie won a bunch of Oscars including Best Picture. I thought that it set the record for shortest movie to win Best Picture, but I guess I got the words mixed up in my head. Instead, I believe it's the movie with the shortest "title" to win Best Picture. It's certainly not brief, but not epic either. Anyway, the odd title of the film actually refers to the name of the main character who lives in France in 1900 and is learning how to get a husband.What's great is that there's this guy who keeps popping in and out of the movie to talk to the audience and sing a song. I just love consistency like that. You might not have known that this was a musical and the songs are a lot of fun. The first third of the movie doesn't even focus that much on Gigi. We instead get a bunch of scenes of other people and how their love lifes are doing. Gigi really does grow as a character and the resolution is great. With the Oscars coming up, I'm so glad to have seen a Best Picture winner. It's a very light hearted movie with catchy songs and I really do love the sets. Everything is just so wonderfully bright and colorful. ***1/2

"Gigi" is a coming of age story involving a girl (Leslie Caron) and the man (Louis Jourdan as Gaston) whose affections for her become romantic when she becomes a young woman.It won the Oscar for Best Film and all eight others it was nominated for after its release in 1958. On every level it was successful, but was it really the best film released that year? Probably not. However the film is charming and it does possess great production values (e.g. costuming, set design). Each scene is like a Renoir or Cassatt come alive. Filmed in France, it captures a joie de vivre that is perfectly personified by Miss Caron. Though her voice is dubbed, she embodies a spirit that infuses every scene of the film. "The Night They Invented Champagne" is the number I most enjoy, and she gives the scene the boundless energy of the cancan.But this is a victory of style over substance, because the story of "Gigi" is very simple. It lacks the depth of "My Fair Lady", for example, which followed six years later and bore striking similarities.Maurice Chevalier (as Honore Lachaille, the uncle of Gaston) and Mr. Jourdan use the same talk-singing style employed by Rex Harrison in "My Fair Lady". It does not detract from "Gigi", but it is noticeable.Some viewers might find the storyline, which deals with the education of a courtesan, less than romantic. And the film--like many others--focuses on the lifestyles of the rich. But "Gigi" is charming nonetheless. It is best to surrender to its charms and appreciate the performance of Miss Caron, whose transformation from girl to woman is flawless.

The musical performances and art direction and most of all Maurice Chevalier make this watchable and even worthwhile. However, I can just not get over a young teenage girl who does not get the ramifications of what she is doing, being groomed for being and advised to be the mistress of a wealthy powerful man. Even the girl's grandmother, great aunt, and the wealthy man's uncle get into the act as in being pro teen mistress. I realize this was 1958, and thus this sort of thing did not seem so creepy at the time, but Maurice Chevalier singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" while ogling little girls on a playground, in the way that he did rather creeped me out too. I think if we didn't have the public spectacle of what happened to a young Monica Lewinsky, discarded by an older powerful man, unmarriageable and unemployable by reputation due to the scandal, whose name will be a joke long after she is in the grave, and now well into her forties alone, maybe I wouldn't feel this way so much, but I digress.This was still the fifties however, and this film chickens out in the end and manages to have a production code approved ending. Somehow not having the courage of its convictions makes it even worse for me.