Mitsou' by Colette and A New Brigitte Bardot
KEENE, FRANCES
On SCREEN By Frances Keene Mitsou' by Colette and A New Brigitte Bardot When Colette's Gigi first bowed on Europe's screens, she was played by a bony adolescent named Danielle Delorme. Hard as it...
...Farce turns to slap-stick in Mam 'zelle Pigalle, the current B.B...
...offering...
...The cramped, garish, untidy, plucky little world of Paris vaudeville is here in all its flimsy finery...
...automatically meant Bernard Berenson, but the amply-bosomed Brigitte Bar-dot has changed all that...
...Less top-drawer than Gigi as to plot, it is at once warmer and funnier...
...There is one particularly striking scene in which, from the interior of an Army canteen, the camera sweeps out toward a sunlit stable yard in time to catch the great bulk of a grey-white per-cheron lumbering by...
...For the rest, it is largely fun and frolic, too...
...For the lovesome lusty wench is well-covered throughout—or almost throughout, for there is one swim-suit sequence, a tiny one...
...Now Miss Delorme stars in another favorite Colette, Mitsou...
...The sobbing youngster, who thinks her heart is breaking because she "isn't good enough" for a young lieutenant, is saved from real pathos by confessing her woes—to her elderly lover...
...I am, and would sit through quite a bit of trivia to see one of the few top comics perform again...
...Colette, one feels sure, would have liked it...
...The wistful pretentiousness Miss Delorme brings to the role is just right, and her naive fidelity, followed by an equally naive infatuation for someone nearer her age, is perfectly credible...
...She has a short but superb scene, alone worth the price of admission...
...But sly wit isn't in it: the "satire" is alternately labored and nebulous—no bite, and what's worse, no Bardot...
...The paradox of innocence training consciously for the role of kept woman was what intrigued Colette about the situation she created in Gigi...
...All ends happily, of course, as a good farce should...
...When he chides her gently for picking just him as her confidant, she snaps through her tears: "Well, who else could I tell...
...Aside from Miss Delorme, who has become a lovely and unbony young woman since her Gigi days, Mitsou brings back Gaby Morlay, one of the greats of the French stage and screen...
...It is a flash of pure pictorial grandeur, an eloquent contrast to the fragility of the Paris world which precedes and follows it...
...The hooks on the bras that don't quite close, the slightly smutty song the comic actress sings, the perpetual gout of the backstage doorkeep, the impassive face of the oriental juggler as he runs through his act before going on, the phoney -ness of the patriotic pageant (we are en pleine guerre, 1915, and all thighs are showing pour la patrie)—all recreate a time and a place which seem infinitely dear because they have been lost forever...
...Hard as it is for filmgoers hereabouts to remember that Gigi wasn't written for Audrey Hepburn, Miss Delorme did as superb a job playing the little cocotte-in-training as her more glamorous British counterpart was to do in the English version...
...The film is a foolish, sometimes embarrassing little gambit which started out as a take-off on our romantic pics...
...The raw-edged fledgling with a gift for moral choice, Gigi, is replaced by a pure-hearted, gauche music-hall artiste who is the star of her particular theater largely because her middle-aged "friend" has paid to put her there...
...The film is in color, showing off to great advantage the costumes, decors, motor cars and other appurtenances of the period...
...The novelty of wide-screen and glorious Omni-Kolor having worn off, you can afford to skip this one unless you happen to be a Mischa Auer fan...
...The attraction of the piece lies less, however, in the personality Colette created for Mitsou than in the atmosphere of the music-hall world...
...Time was when B.B...
...And, though no great tradition exists for call girls in our society, there must be enough recognition that the true courtesan's role exists somewhere for our audiences to have found the paradox intriguing, too...
...This was a world Colette herself knew well, and whenever she wrote about it—whether gaily as in Mitsou or darkly as in La Vagabonde—she pulled out all the stops...
...And the lover promptly does the correct thing by becoming paternal and pygmaliontic...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 18
