Fanny (1961)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) There’s an undeniable tension in becoming an aging playboy — what sounds cute as a young man pursuing equally young women curdles and turns creepy when it’s the same older man still hitting on just-as-young women, and if you want to talk about the enduring flaws of Hollywood, that’s a big one. I would hope that the recent readjustment in tolerance for sexual harassment will lead to change in this area, but, in the meantime, we still have decades of examples to contend with. One of the chief exhibits in this field would be Maurice Chevalier — a perfectly charming young premier in the 1930s who, by the 1960s, found himself back in Hollywood as a much older man. The traditional way to address this is to go the look-but-don’t-touch route, with older men dispensing love wisdom and memories of past romances to younger men, while still looking appreciatively at the younger women around them. In the Oscar-nominated Fanny, however, we get a much more complex take on a similar idea, as Chevalier (then 73) plays a rich older man in French coastal Marseilles, who overtly courts a much younger woman (Leslie Caron, then 30) for marriage. But there are complications — the biggest being that the young woman loves an equally young man who has left to sea after impregnating her. The April-October romance becomes more acceptable as a way for her (and her father, and the village) to save face. But there’s a lot more in store, and much of the interest in the middle section of the film is in those unpredictable plot developments popping up to make things more complex, and chip away at the male fantasy of an old man marrying a younger woman. The ending gets us back to where this was all going (with age-appropriate romantic partners) but the way to get there is more picturesque than expected. The film has other assets — the seaside Marseilles atmosphere is often very likable, and Chevalier gets to spar on-screen with long-time friend and fellow French expat Charles Boyer. Caron simply looks timelessly beautiful with long hair, and having Chevalier in one of his last decent romantic roles goes better than expected. Fanny, rather than leave the creepy older-man/younger-woman romance unexamined, squarely engages with the trope and gets a lot of dramatic mileage out of it: it’s really not as distasteful as you’d expect.