A musical starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in a touristic Paris among elite fashionistas... Hepburn wears Ginenchy, Astaire dances with his cane... There are songs by the Gershwins... How can it fail? Well, maybe once upon a time it was a fairytale about a plain, bookish girl who finds love, fame and beauty in one of the great cities of the world...
But, now it feels more about an intelligent girl who is made trivial by being plucked from a Greenwich Village bookshop and strong-armed into becoming a model. Still, Audrey and Paris are beautiful, and Stanley Donan's colourful visuals in Vistavision are vividly chic, so why not just give in to the glamour?
Astaire was 58 when he made this and it's not his best work as a dancer. And he's too old as a lover, for her. But he has some fine songs (including S'Wonderful). It's the vivacious and lovely Audrey who gets the film on its feet. Her dance numbers are actually more fun. There are some amusing sketches, particularly when Fred and Kay Thompson gatecrash a beatnik party.
It's hard to credit Hepburn as the plain Jane of the title, but this is the movies. And she graces the fluff with a sincere performance. The script tries to convince us that the intellectual world is as phoney as high fashion, but that doesn't compute. This is superficial frou-frou that the great stars almost turn into Hollywood magic.