***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Kay Thompson, Michael Auclair
screenplay by Leonard Gershe
directed by Stanley Donen
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There was a time, long, long ago, when we all thought we could get away with saying that pop movies were subversive. Not "could be" subversive, but were subversive: full stop, end sentence, new paragraph. To a certain extent, the penetration of pop culture into the academy was a necessary step to level the playing field and make every avenue of culture viable for discussion. The thing is, the playing field didn't stay level for long: instead of an environment that could handle Jacques Rivette and Judy Garland, the former got chucked aside as students and teachers raided their TV/movie/music greatest hits collections and wilfully misread their cheesy favourites as deep and complex texts. This was based less on a populist impulse than on a desire to not challenge oneself; it's way easier to deal with the pleasures in front of your face than it is to hunt in the dark for new things and grapple with their potentially difficult forms and subjects. While I wouldn't trade Douglas Sirk or Anthony Mann or Nicolas Ray for anything, one has to be honest about the situation. Sometimes Hollywood can disturb the status quo, but it can also use its professionalism, wit, and artfulness to pull off something as entertainingly retrograde as Stanley Donen's Funny Face.
The tone is more or less established by the opening sequence, a highly stylized number that initially awes you with its near-flawless aestheticism. Donen's camera tracks through the many doors of a fashion magazine's headquarters until a bunch of women hustle through the centre door into the office of editor Maggie Prescott ("Eloise" creator Kay Thompson). She berates them for a boring issue, then declares that the women of America should, en masse, "Think Pink!" Cue the Gershwin song, cue the bolts of pink fabric artfully strewn around the office, cue the pop-modern photomontage that smacks you in the face with its virtuosity. It's a stunningly-designed, exquisitely-photographed, deliciously-costumed set-piece that shows Hollywood at its brilliant best. Except that Maggie Prescott is notably dressed in grey, and when pressed on the matter of the other colour, she states categorically: "I wouldn't be caught dead in pink!" On the surface it's a cute gag, but its real goal is to normalize the process by which the fashion industry manipulates the public into accepting its commercial whims. The joke is funny so long as we don't realize it's at our expense.
But there are bigger problems to tackle. The main one lies in the film's attempted co-optation of the Greenwich Village Beat scene: in the tradition of all Hollywood appropriations of topical marginality, it acknowledges the phenomenon only to tame and subvert one of its members. That member is Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), the shy bookstore clerk who has her life changed when a fashion shoot invades her workplace and "discovers" her as a model. Famed photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) decides for her that she will both be a clotheshorse AND his girlfriend–and, of course, because she's really just a repressed wallflower looking for love and acceptance, she eventually caves. Never mind that she's expressed contempt for the phoniness of the fashion world, that she's a self-described serious intellectual, or that she espouses some half-baked philosophy called "Empathicalism" that's been contrived by writer Leonard Gershe to gently condescend to the people who believe in the real deal. Hollywood demands a female sacrifice–and what Hollywood wants, Hollywood gets.
Thus the culture industry first justifies its underhanded machinations designed to separate you from your cash, then casts anyone unimpressed by its fancy baubles as deprived children in need of the love and attention we keep hearing are our prime motivators. Never mind that they get everything wrong–those coffee-house desperados were largely super-assertive self-lovers with more intestinal fortitude than H'wood could ever muster. Incredibly, they cast Jo as a naïve dreamer who's shocked when her Empathicalist mentor Prof. Flostre (Michel Auclaire) puts the moves on her late in the film. Not only is this a logistical impossibility (a Sartrean Beat who's afraid of sex?), but it also glosses over the fact that Dick uses methods similar to those of Flostre, although they're presented far more benignly. (In fact, Flostre is squeaky-clean by comparison: all he does is bluntly and unmistakably express sexual interest; Dick arrogantly kisses Jo without permission and cons her into coming to the office, where she's bullied into modelling by Maggie and her minions.) It might seem a bit much to feministically denounce a film from 1957, but as Jo initially berates Dick for his 'Neanderthal' behaviour, one has to come to the conclusion that Funny Face knows exactly what it's afraid of and exactly who its targets are.
The reader might now understandably wonder how, after so much vitriol, I deigned to award this shameful musical a full three stars. The answer is, it's really, really entertaining. More than that, it's a brilliant piece of hyper-real aestheticism: Stanley Donen (who presided over that more benign piece of culture-industry normalization Singin' in the Rain–and, puzzlingly, the guardedly pro-union The Pajama Game, released the same year as Funny Face) proves as brilliant as ever, marshalling some very impressive art/camera/costume personnel to create something as witty and well-put as the Gershwin songs it uses as its backbone. This isn't merely an expensive piece of mainstream might: it's very close to artful in its deployment of the Madison Avenue modernity it pushes to absurd extremes. Donen isn't phoning it in–he's beguiled by the visual possibilities of the clean-line chic of the New York and Paris fashion worlds, as well as by the skeletal romantic outline that makes the distasteful musculature palatable. In visual terms, at least, this is a director throwing himself the full length, and because of his belief in the innocent pleasures of movie romance, Funny Face is, for extended periods, sweet, lovely, and even beautiful.
Alas, that doesn't change anything. I suppose the film isn't a standard-bearer for defenders of Subversive Hollywood and never will be–but that's the point. This is the true face of American mainstream film, a wholehearted endorsement of sadly conformist attitudes offered with a fatherly smile and the suggestion that it's what we wanted in the first place. It's this more common kind of film that's lost in the shuffle when people get uppity and defend the dream factory for its nobler efforts. Forget that most of the initial auteurists defined such directors as sublimating their interests into an industrial form, or that Manny Farber declared these artists "termites." Most of the people we revere as the Hollywood hellraisers were either sneaking their subtexts in by cover of night or had such a tempestuous relationship with the studios that they paid dearly for their difference and intransigence. For those who would propose that respect for so-called high culture is a matter of upper-class elitism vs. the Will of the People, consider that this movie and many like it are molding that will to support the questionable ends of an entirely different sort of financial elite.
Though I can salvage the parts of Funny Face that give me pleasure without any guilt, this doesn't mean I have to be blind to its faults, which are the faults of the system that make it possible. More to the point, it sure doesn't mean I can pretend that everything produced by that system is engineered for anything besides the greater glory of self-perpetuating greedheads. We must be alive to the people doing their best in a bad business, but that doesn't mean we have to accept the roadblocks thrown those peoples' way–which are, indeed, the roadblocks thrown in front of our understanding, too. If I still love a lot of this stuff, I also love a lot of the stuff the industry does its level best to obscure, impugn, and otherwise stamp out. Looking the other way isn't going to get anybody anywhere.
Paramount's 50th Anniversary DVD reissue of Funny Face would by all accounts represent a noticeable upgrade for owners of the previous disc. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced transfer is sharp and lustrous, with the excellent, subtle colouring necessary for a film with so wide and varied a palette. A Dolby 5.1 remix was probably the wrong way to go (it's not terribly articulate or deep), but with the original mono stems preserved on another track, it hardly matters. Extras begin with "The Designer and His Muse" (8 mins.), a brief look at the relationship between Hepburn and fashion god Hubert Givenchy, exploring how he dressed her in Funny Face and Sabrina in addition to serving as a father figure for the tentative young actor. It's a little too short to be satisfying yet provocative nonetheless. "Parisian Dreams" (7 mins.) alternates annoying gush and surprisingly sound analysis of the film's aesthetics; the analysis wins out with a discussion of Richard Avedon's invaluable contribution as a "consultant" and the unusual-for-the-time location shooting in Paris. "Paramount in the 50's [sic]" (9 mins.) is a totally needless, completely facile reflection on the studio's biggest hits of the period, from Sunset Blvd. to The Ten Commandments. It's cheesy, hyperbolic, and ultimately without interest. Rounding things out: a photo gallery and Funny Face's theatrical trailer.
103 minutes; G; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish, Portuguese subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
