Bonjour et bienvenue à I Am Glad My Suffering Amuses You, une petite baquette perdue dans la boulangerie Français qu’est Internet.
Aujourd’hui, nous présentons un épisode spécial de mon reportage hebdomadaire qui se penche sur des films avec non pas un, mais deux films se déroulant en France.
<sigh!>
Let's try that again.
Hello and welcome to I Am So Glad My Suffering Amuses You, a little baguette lost in the French bakery that is the internet.
Today we present a special installment of my weekly feature that looks at movies with not one but two films set in France.
For today's Cinema Sunday, let's turn out attention to An American in Paris.
It is a 1951 American musical comedy film inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition An American in Paris by George Gershwin. Mostly it's an exercise in showcasing Gene Kelly dancing whenever possible loosely tied around a story of a "young" American soldier who decides to stick around Paris after World War II to pursue his passion for painting.
And to fall in love.
Ahhhhhhhhhh!
I put "young" in quotes because Gene Kelly was pushing 40 when he made this movie and the actress who plays the woman he falls in love with? Leslie Caron had just turned 20 when she made her film debut in this movie.
Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) is a boisterous expatriate in Paris trying to make it as a painter.
Adam Cook (Oscar Levant) is Jerry's friend and neighbor, a concert pianist who is struggling because he's too dedicated to his art to sell out.
Adam is friends with Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary), a French singer who tells Adam of his is cultured girlfriend, Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron). She is introduced in a fantasy sequence where Henri describes her as passionate but demure, quiet but outspoken, well read but also likes to party. Lise goes through many different costumes and dance routines while Henri can't seem to make up his mind what kind of woman she is.
Jerry is not part of this conversation. That'll be important lately.
File Lise away for a minute. We'll get back to her shortly.
Jerry meets a woman, Milo Roberts, an heiress with more time and money than she knows what to do with and a passion for art. She sees Jerry's paintings and likes what she sees. She sees Jerry with his Gene Kelly dancer's physique and like what she sees. Milo insists her interests are purely in Jerry's art but yeah there's some quid pro quo working around in her head.
Milo takes Jerry to meet some friends of hers at nightclub where Jerry spies a young woman and falls totally head over heels in love on sight.
Yes, it's Lise Bouvier.
Milo isn't happy. She done brung him to this dance and he's drooling over some young girl in front of her?
Lise isn't happy. Some dude she doesn't know is horning in on her evening with friends?
Lise is even less happy when Jerry tracks her down the next day at the shop where she works. Oh this is borderline stalking shit now!
But since Jerry is a character in a movie (not a real person) and being played by Gene Kelly no less, well dammit, she can't help but be swayed by his charms, his smile, his jokes, his graceful dancer's bod.
Jerry and Lise begin a romance with furtive meetings at whatever times of the day or night they can find time.
Milo has Jerry hopping as she's still determined set a fire under his painting career.
Lise has her own secrets. Such as her relationship with French singer Henri Baurel. (Remember that guy?)
Henri and Jerry will have a duet, singing "'S Wonderful" as they both wax rhapsodic over their love for the woman they are in love with, unaware they're singing about the same person.
Henri Baurel has a gig to go on tour in America and decides this will be the perfect time to get married to Lise which... you know... complicates things.
Heartbroken, Jerry spends 17 minutes dreaming of life with Lise in Paris during a ballet sequence set to George Gershwin's composition of An American in Paris which is why this movie exists anyway.
Not much of a spoiler to say Jerry & Lise will end the movie together because... well... they are supposed to.
They literally know nothing about each other.
They've been starry eyed enamored with each other in various romantic Parisian locales but really...
As we have seen in other movies I've covered in Cinema Sunday, our male and female leads will be together because they must be, whether it makes sense or not.
Maybe I'm expecting too much from this experience. An American In Paris is pretty to look at with wonderful music and dance performances. Gene Kelly is funny and charming while Leslie Caron is winsome and ethereally beautiful.
The "It's That Person From That Thing" Dept.
Noel Neill has a small role as an American art student who tries to critique Jerry's paintings. Noel was Lois Lane in two Superman serials and in the TV series The Adventures of Superman.
From Superman to Batman, we get Madge Blake as a customer in the perfume shop where Lise works. Madge would go on to portray Aunt Harriet in the Batman TV series in the 1960's. She is also the Hollywood gossip reporter in Gene Kelly's Singin' In the Rain.
We move from Paris to the Atlantic coast of France and the city of Nantes for Lola, a French film made in 1961.
I watched this one on TCM a few weeks back for reasons that escape me. I think I was intrigued to watch a film made during the tyranny of the Hays Code but not being an American film, undeterred by it.
Somebody actually says the word "shit".
Although the title character, Lola is not the focus of this movie. Most of our time is spent with Roland Cassard, an aimless guy with no real sense of purpose.
Roland gets a bit of a kick start after a chance encounter with Lola, a person he knew as a child before World War II. Now she is a single mother working as a cabaret dancer.
Roland falls in love with her but Lola is still loyal to Michel who got her pregnant 7 years ago then vanished. Lola still thinks that Michel will return one day, all will be forgiven and they will be together in love once more.
Roland isn't the only one pining for Lola. There's Frank, an American sailor from Chicago. Frank is enchanted by Lola but she ain't buying what he's selling.
Meanwhile, Roland falls into a gig as a courier for smugglers. Roland narrowly avoids trouble with the law when the smugglers are arrested before Roland can show up for work.
There's also some plotline involving a young girl named Cécile who crosses paths with Roland in a book store. Later on the day of her 14th birthday, Cécile gets to hang out a carnival with an American sailor from Chicago. Oh look! Frankie's still in the movie.
And son of a bitch if Michel doesn't turn up after all and Lola goes off with him like she always said she would.
It's a bit of a surreal experience, watching a movie in French. Maybe it owes to the translation from French to English sub-titles but there is a certain artifice to the way people talk. Everyone in Lola is in some kind of dream state, Lola blissfully lost in her daydream of Michel's return, Roland aimlessly lost in the nightmare of an existence without purpose.
Even when Lola's dream comes true in the end with Michel's return, it seems almost too good to be true, as if Lola is still in a dream.
It's all heady stuff.
Next weekend, Cinema Sunday will celebrate Halloween with not one but two films as we experience...
The Horror! THE HORROR!!!!
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