Leslie Caron

  • Le divorce (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) Calling a film a blender-mix of elements is rarely an entirely positive qualifier, and that certainly applies to Le Divorce’s mixture of subplots, tones, actors, nationalities and characters flying into Paris. Much of the narrative framework of the film has to do with a mixed-nationality couple breaking up, and the messy aftermath of dividing the conjugal assets… especially when there’s a valuable painting in the lot. There’s an interesting sampling of actors spanning generations and oceans, whether it’s Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, Glenn Close, Stephen Fry, Matthew Modine, Thierry Lhermite and a late high-profile role for Leslie Caron. Directed by James Ivory, Le Divorce zips from one thing to another, as the ensemble cast interacts in a variety of ways, whether it’s the fallout of the divorce (and the husband’s presentation of his new paramour), the fight over the prized painting, an affair between a French politician and a young American, and plenty of other things along the way. The tone is not constrained—we zip from drama to comedy to romance to a final heavy tragic note—and that’s arguably part of the film’s mosaic. The problem, though, is that we get such a sampling of everything that it’s hard for Le Divorce to make a single impression. It’s watchable enough, but not quite enough to be likable.

  • Leslie Caron: The Reluctant Star (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Documentaries starring elderly actors or filmmakers reflecting on their careers are essentially a subgenre by now, and they have to be approached with very specific expectations. Forget about getting the full story, let alone the true story: At their ages, with their reputations, stars sitting down to talk about their careers want a monologue rather than an interview. They will present semi-fictional takes on their lives and careers, impose later conclusions on their earlier actions and generally come out of it having delivered a performance about themselves. Leslie Caron is no exception, as her rather chaotic career is described throughout The Reluctant Star. Going between her native France, Hollywood and London, she never regained the superstardom of her first few years (it’s hard to top early years featuring An American in Paris and Gigi), but says she was happy about that… hence the title. You have to take those statements with a grain of salt, though, as she expresses frustration at being unable to act in more French films. But even as a hagiography, it’s still an interesting portrait. Caron had a very different career than her contemporaries, finding a living through lower-profile dramatic roles in three moviemaking centres but never pursuing or recapturing early stardom. She still comes across as a lively, wise presence with much to say. It’s amusing to see some of my favourite films of hers not getting much attention (namely Fanny and Father Goose), and some of her own favourites being far less known to the general public. In the end, authorized hagiography or not, it’s just a delight for The Reluctant Star to have captured her thoughts. Let print biographers tackle the inner workings of her psychology and the less-admirable aspects of her life, if any—here she describes herself in her own words, and that’s interesting enough.

  • Fanny (1961)

    Fanny (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Father Goose (1964)

    Father Goose (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2021) By the mid 1960s, sixty-something Cary Grant was seriously contemplating retirement. Having played romantic leads for the near entirety of his career and unwilling to change by taking on supporting or non-romantic roles, his options were getting more limited and his on-screen partners increasingly ludicrous. Leslie Caron, for instance, was 27 years his junior when shooting Father Goose — while the film (his penultimate) doesn’t necessarily look like a romantic comedy in its first half, the second quickly reverts to form, as his crusty beachcomber protagonist eventually marries the schoolteacher in desperate circumstances just to, ahem, goose up the film’s tension. It’s a shame, because the first half does a few interesting things — chiefly by taking Grant out of a suit and into a scraggly alcoholic hermit’s role, manipulated by acquaintances into contributing to the Allied resistance against the Japanese on the Pacific front. Grant’s charming mumbling remains as entertaining as ever, and the script is ingenious in contriving an interesting situation when eight schoolgirls and their caretaker disrupt his new routine. It’s afterwards that Father Goose gets far more conventional at a breakneck speed. While there are a few worthwhile moments (including a very funny response to a schoolgirl getting a crush on a sixty-year-old man), the film seems so preoccupied in creating, advancing and resolving the romance between Grant and Caron’s character that this only highlights its artificiality. Oh, Grant is his usual compelling self, and Caron looks better than in other movies with longer hair. The interplay between the two is not bad, and the screenplay does hit its mark. I’m probably being overly critical of the film — a Cary Grant film is worth a look even when it doesn’t hit the heights of the rest of his filmography. Still, Father Goose does demonstrate why Grant retired when he did, rather than take on roles that diminished his persona.

  • Promise Her Anything (1966)

    Promise Her Anything (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I suppose that “a romantic comedy written by the author of The Exorcist” is not the best way to sell Promise Her Anything, so try something like “Warren Beatty plays a Greenwich Village nudie film director who is stuck babysitting the toddler son of a love interest played by Leslie Caron.”  There! Much better—although not that appealing. Infused with the very particular atmosphere of a 1960s sex comedy but saddled with some messy romantic comedy complications, this is a film that doesn’t quite know where it’s going, and certainly can’t hit a mark that it doesn’t know exists. If you’re in the business of selling romantic fantasy, you’re also responsible for selling a simplification of life. Once we’re deep in the female lead picking husbands, one of her picks being a kid-hating paediatrician and the other making adult movies while the kid is watching… well, that’s not exactly reassuring at all. (Even the “adult film” portion is toned down, as per 1960s comedies, to nothing worse than swimwear.) Beatty is stuck in a light comedy not suitable for his talents, and the same can also be said for Caron, although she does get to wear an amazing body-hugging white lace two-piece outfit that’s easily more alluring than the half-naked girls showing up in the naughty films. It’s all acceptable if you’re in a forgiving mood, but it’s not in any way exceptional even when you compare it to other 1960s sex comedies. It either doesn’t try or try too hard, and as a result it settles for nothing much. Promise Her Anything is slightly interesting if you’re looking to catalogue the evolution of film comedy in the 1960s, but by the point it becomes relevant, you’ve already seen all the better ones.

  • The Story of Three Loves (1953)

    The Story of Three Loves (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) As much as we can admire classic Hollywood’s greatest hits, talk fondly about its actors and follow the filmography of its directors, not every film of the era leaves a mark, even when it does feature great directors and a cast of known names. That’s the case with The Story of Three Loves given its severe structural issues: an anthology film composed of three segments, it suffers from the usual afflictions of such movies. The actors are only there for a third of the time, the tone shifts all over the place, the segments aren’t equally interesting, and there’s less time to attach ourselves to the characters, which is particularly bad in discussing character-based romance. Accordingly, perhaps, each segment has its own gimmick — from ballet dancing to body-switching to trapeze. Alas, the three segments also feel like short takes on topics that would be best approached in better full-length movies such as The Red Shoes, Big and Trapeze, respectively. Sure, there’s Kirk Douglas tearing up the screen, Leslie Caron speaking French and James Mason’s distinctive vocal cadence. But they’re not there for the entire film — in fact, they’re in three different segments. Vincente Minnelli directs one segment but not the others. Perhaps inevitably, The Story of Three Loves doesn’t leave much of an impression, nor much to chew upon. It is an eloquent example of what early-1950s MGM could bring to bear on a project, but it’s not, by itself, something particularly striking.

  • The Man with a Cloak (1951)

    The Man with a Cloak (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2020) Two Classic Hollywood genres crash into each other in The Man with a Cloak: The historical drama and film noir. I mean—why not? Part 1948 costume drama, part historical fantasy involving the fate of Napoleon’s France being played out in Manhattan by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically through the vast fortune of one of the film’s characters. Alas, many people are after that fortune, and the film takes a sombre turn when wills, poisons and deaths come into play. While it takes a while to heat up (frankly, the beginning is just dull), The Man with a Cloak does get nicely dramatic after a while—all the way to a knock-down drawn-out fist-fight at the end. This being said, I suppose that most twenty-first viewers will have a look due to Barbara Stanwyck (always magnificent) in one of the lead roles, alongside Joseph Cotton as a mysterious investigator and Leslie Caron playing a visiting Frenchwoman. It’s not quite correct to call The Man with a Cloak a pure film noir, but in addition to borrowing plot elements from the genre (and a bit of gothic mystery), it also tries to ape many of its stylistic features—albeit to middling effect, as director Fletcher Markle wasn’t exactly a gifted stylist. Still, it does add a bit of atmosphere to a film that can certainly use it. The film’s final revelation feels more like a joke than a serious twist, but there it is. The Man with a Cloak is hardly a great film, but it does offer something slightly different from either pure costume drama or film noir. Plus, hey : Stanwyck.

  • Lili (1953)

    Lili (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) The comparison points between Lili and other hit movies of previous years underline that this was a follow-up film trying to capitalize on many of the same crowd-pleasing elements without quite having what it takes to pull it off. Itemizing the obvious similarities: MGM musical, picturesque French setting, Leslie Caron in the lead, and a big fantasy ballet number in the last third of the film. Yup; some studio executives saw Gigi or An American in Paris and thought they could do more of the same. It’s hard to fault their thinking—Lili did good business and was nominated for a surprising number of Academy Awards. Let’s remember that this was at a time when MGM could not do wrong. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged so well: Mel Ferrer is good, but no substitute as a singer/dancer for someone like Gene Kelly, and Caron can’t quite sustain the entire weight of the film on her shoulders. Worse yet is the feeling that this is a rethread, a very deliberate attempt to capture past glory. The puppet motif seems a bit too self-satisfied, and the musical aspect of the film is underwhelming—there aren’t many songs, and they’re not particularly catchy. From a twenty-first century perspective, the idea of a thirtysomething man puppeteering a suicidal sixteen-year-old character into a relationship is far creepier than the puppets themselves. Even if Lili is not bad per se (it even features Zsa Zsa Gabor, if that’s your thing), it’s only worth a shrug when placed alongside the other musicals that inspired it.

  • Gigi (1958)

    Gigi (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2018) I’m annoyed that I don’t like Gigi more than I do. After all, at first glance, it should work much better than it does—it’s a big-budget musical that manages to affect a cynical view of romances before going back to classical values right in time for the ending. Set in early-20th century Paris, Gigi takes on the courtesan culture and makes it shine as an entirely acceptable alternative for young women who can’t be bothered by traditional life paths. In other hands, it could have been a playful, insightful way to poke fun at the conventions of musicals. Alas, this Oscar-award-winning movie makes a few missteps along the way and really doesn’t leave a good impression. Things get off on a now-terrifying wrong foot as the movie begins with an older man signing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” essentially making a case that young girls are awesome because they’ll grow up to be sexy women worth sleeping with. Eeeeeeeeek. (Contemporary restaging of Gigi wisely give the song to the elderly courtesan character, which is only marginally less icky but still an improvement.)  Too bad for Maurice Chevalier, who’s otherwise quite charming and likable as an older playboy who’s come to his senses—thematically, his “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore” is the kind of topic I wish was covered more often in pop culture. Other bad touches abound, such as a jocular way of looking at the male protagonist earning his “first suicide attempt” from a jilted ex-lover. Given this far more adult take on romantic musicals, what’s perhaps most damning about Gigi is the way it may present itself at an edgy film but ultimately (and predictably) fall back on rote values in time for its ending. It simply doesn’t have the guts to follow its early contrarian impulses. As a result, it ends up as a muddled piece of work—too cynical to be mindlessly enjoyable, but ultimately unsatisfying for not forging its own path. Taken as individual musical numbers, it’s still often visually spectacular and impressive in the way only classic MGM musicals could be. (My favourite anecdote about the film is that the day following Gigi’s Best Picture Oscar win, MGM receptionists answered the phone with “M-Gigi-M”) But—wow—has the film aged badly in some crucial ways. 

  • An American in Paris (1951)

    An American in Paris (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2018) I’ll be the first to admit that classic musicals aren’t for everyone, but there’s a fun quality to An American in Paris that makes it irresistible. From the pleasantly idealized portrait of post-war Paris to witty musical numbers that acknowledge their own nature as musical numbers, this is a fun, not particularly deep but rather enjoyable musical. It won an Oscar, but it feels considerably less substantial than you’d expect—just a few Americans having fun in a glossy version of Paris, wooing girls and getting into all sorts of dance numbers. Gene Kelly is fantastic in the lead role (he also brought his distinctive touch to the film’s choreography, including the spectacular but rather long standout ballet sequence at the end of the film), with Leslie Caron simply being adorable as the romantic ideal, and Oscar Levant as comic relief. While An American in Paris is notable for its extended ballet sequence that makes much of the film’s last half-hour, I found it long and disconnected from the rest of the film—of course, that’s the point. And it’s impressive to see Kelly make ballet not only accessible to movie audiences, but actually fun. Still, I like other moments of the film better—The “black-and-white” party sequence is visually memorable, and the sequence in which Henri first describes the heroine of the film is a delight. I can never say enough good things about Kelly, the colours are bright, the atmosphere is delightful and as an example of the height of MGM’s musical comedy era it’s about as good a representation of the form as possible—I like Singin’ in the Rain a lot more, but there’s a difference between a solid example of the form and something that completely transcends it. The exemplar should not feel slighted for not being exceptional.