“If you can cook/the way you look/ I’ll cross the ocean just to have you by my side…”: irresistible. Funny Face was a complicated production. It came about through a not so easy negotiation between MGM (which had Donen), Warner (which had the songs) and Paramount (which had Hepburn and Astaire), but when the Hollywood contract disagreements were finally resolved, the result was a masterpiece. Audrey Hepburn, first in her plain gray dresses as the intellectual clerk in a Village bookshop and then in the sinuous haute couture of Givenchy, is a graphic image that walks throughout the film with otherworldly elegance. Like in other films (the beginning of Sabrina, in Love in the Afternoon, in Charade, in How to Steal a Million) Paris is the city that wraps around her like a soft silk shawl. The screenplay makes fun of Sartre’s existentialism (here called empathicalism) with crude, big-time American mischief: but we can tolerate it if in exchange we’re given this Audrey-Musidora who, in wispy all black, dances geometric patterns on the tables of some cave – smoky, of course. Outside Paris (Bonjour, Paris!) fills our eyes and lungs with the plein-air that Donen makes slide from touristy to dream-like, and the romantic dream drags us into a whirlwind of intimate, Gershwinian musical sequences: the numbers Let’s KissandMake-up, He LovesandShe loves and Funny Face (“allegory of photography and love at first sight”, Gerard Légrand) continue to be among the highest moments in the history of the musical. The photographer played by Fred Astaire is based on Richard Avedon (who was a colour consultant for the film), the caustic fashion editor played by Kay Thompson according to some alluded to Vogue’s Diane Vreeland, according to others to Carmel Snow of Harper’s. Hepburn (this is the only film in which she sings with her own voice) as usual was inspired only by herself: and Stanley Donen is, along with Wilder and Edwards, the director who best knew how to build a world around her sunny funny face.

An ugly duckling (Audrey Hepburn) is transformed into a swan. The artificial world of American fashion provides the setting. This musical comedy, from a colour point of view, is perhaps the most original American film to date. There are some surprising and unprecedented images. I wonder what the French will make of their caricature, but this is another issue. If you prefer films with songs and dancing over ones without, you must see Funny Face.
Herman G. Weinberg, in “Cahiers du cinéma”, 76, 1957