Funny Face (1957)

Great Film overall

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

"Funny Face" is pure cotton candy; colorful and sweet, but with such little substance, it disappears almost as quickly as it appears. Nonetheless, who doesn't love cotton candy? Nazis. That's who. It's so delightfully buoyant and colorfully entertaining, I don't even care that they are incessantly trying to convince us that Audrey Hepburn isn't gorgeous.

I am a fan of Audrey Hepburn, but generally hate musicals (though there are a few exceptions - The Sound of Music, Across the Universe, amongst others), so this was always going to be interesting. Turns out even Audrey Hepburn can't overcome a lame plot, dull music, unimaginative direction and a unconvincing and wooden leading actor. More than boring, this film is irritating. The campy pretentiousness of the setting, the irritating fashion people, the songs which hardly have a tune. It all just seems so contrived and lame.Worst of all, Audrey Hepburn gets made to look bad thanks to the movie. Her character is overly nerdy, and the songs just don't suit her.A very bitter disappointment.

Audrey Hepburn rocketed to stardom in the 1950s, unwittingly becoming a style icon overnight. Stanley Donen's "Funny Face" finds her character, Jo Stockton, making a similar transformation. A bookish intellectual, Stockton is stumbled upon by Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson) and Dick Avery (Fred Astaire), a pair of fashion magazine workers who are desperately searching for a face that is both "beautiful" and "intelligent". Stockton has such a face."Funny Face" attempts to satirise two worlds: the fashion industry and its pockets of "haute couture", and 1950s intellectualism, with its Beatniks, hipsters and trendy French existentialists. The film ends with a French philosopher revealing that he is infatuated with Stockton's body and not her mind. French philosophy, then, is as surface-obsessed as high street fashion, a pseudo-intellectual ploy used to achieve by dishonest means the same goal that American men achieve honestly. Though predominantly anti-intellectual as a whole, the film's climax finds the worlds of High Fashion and High Philosophy eventually empathising with one another, each sphere learning that it is as self-absorbed as the other."Funny Face" may not work as drama, satire or romance (Astaire and Hepburn never convince as a couple in love), but it is nevertheless stylistically interesting. Donen's location photography is impressive, his lighting, colour schemes and filters give the film an eye-popping look, and at least two musical interludes are memorable. Throw in the charismatic Astaire, the regal Hepburn, and some mildly interesting fashion by Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy, and you have one of Donen's better pictures.6.5/10 - See Minnelli's "The Clock".

FUNNY FACE is notable as a colourful '50s-era music teaming the talents of two of the best-known stars of all time, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. In this film, whose story feels like an earlier version of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, Astaire and Hepburn consummate a May-December relationship when they're brought together by chance.Hepburn stars as one of those unbelievable mousy characters - here a bookshop assistant - who's transformed into an ultra-glamorous model when she goes to Paris for a photo shoot. Astaire is the top-of-his-game photographer, and much of the film gets by on their easy charm.Of course, there are there requisite song-and-dance numbers to enjoy, and a storyline that's never too heavy or too much. In all, it's just right, and old hand Stanley Donen brings plenty to the production with his assured direction. A very good-natured and pleasing effort.