From the director of Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and starring a pair of cinematic icons, Funny Face boasts a flawless pedigree. It’s difficult to imagine a more congenial way to spend an afternoon than with this breezy technicolor musical.
Fred Astaire is Dick Avery, a fashion photographer fed up of working with beautiful idiots. When a location shoot in a bookshop turns up the earnest Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), Avery persuades his editor, Maggie Prescott (the wonderfully arch Kay Thompson), to make the bookish intellectual the new face of her fashion magazine. Stockton agrees only because it means a free trip to Paris, and the stage is set for mishaps, glamour and romance.
Few films can ever have been so stylish as this one. Quite aside from Hepburn’s legendary glamour, it features a veritable feast of delicious vintage Givenchy fashion, stunningly beautiful French locations, flawless dance sequences set to a sophisticated George and Ira Gershwin soundtrack, all filmed in colours as lush and vivid as a dream. And if the 30-year age gap between Astaire and Hepburn means the romantic storyline stretches credibility, both actors are so charismatic that it seems churlish even to mention it.
Funny Face may superficially seem like a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy, but it’s actually a film full of contradictions. It is both an affectionate homage to, and a scathing satire of, the fashion industry. The heroine’s intelligence is praised even as the pomposity of pretentious intellectuals is pricked. Hepburn is both the eponymous “funny face” (implausible as that may seem) and a glamourous and graceful model. And the era-appropriate casual sexism cannot diminish the fact that two of the three central characters are strong and independent women. Somehow it’s a film that feels simultaneously ahead of its time, and absolutely a product of its era.