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Can one marry a model, wonders Nabokov, just add the Gershwins and Technicolor and VistaVision, Stanley Donen retorts. The screen is a glossy fashion spread, the editor of Quality magazine (Kay Thompson) declares her philosophy to "the great American woman, who stands there naked, waiting for me to tell her what to wear." The veteran photographer (Fred Astaire) has no luck with the clothes-horse from Brooklyn so he tries Greenwich Village, a "movingly dismal" bookshop fits the bill, the clerk (Audrey Hepburn) gets a kiss and is left to wonder what she's been missing. "Is it fun or should I run? How long has this been going on?" Galatea in the darkroom, under a crimson bulb and before a glowing camera until, for the benefit of Antonioni, she's distilled to eyes and nose and mouth on a white blow-up. Becker's Falbalas is a precedent so the move to Paris is most appropriate, from the Champs-Élysées to Montparnasse to the Eiffel Tower, a sightseeing jaunt that splits the frame three ways to honor the tricolore flag. "You're not only a model, you're an actress." Avedon and Sartre are the dueling figures, the gamine who poses all day bursts into defiant movement in the galaxy of blazing colors of the avant-garde bistro. (Astaire responds to her modernism with a display of danced classicism, a pantomimed corrida with cape and umbrella.) The couturier (Robert Flemyng) announces "a bird of paradise" out of "a lowly caterpillar," the philosopher (Michel Auclair) expounds on "l'empathicalisme" but the Pepé Le Pew within leaps out once alone with the eager pupil. "C'est tragique." "You can say that again." Thompson's bravura enjoyment culminates with a bit of Dixie among existentialists, the artist and the bride on a raft off the meadow deserve a word of their own, "S'Wonderful." Minnelli shares the artifice in Designing Woman, Altman takes a long piss in Prêt-à-Porter. Cinematography by Ray June. With Dovima, Suzy Parker, Sunny Hartnett, Virginia Gibson, and Ruta Lee.
--- Fernando F. Croce |