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The look on the Parisian photographer’s aid as he watches Audrey Hepburn pose from his perch on the Seine riverboat says it all. She’s magic.
But she’s not alone.
George and Ira Gershwin made the music magic. Fred Astaire provided the masculine charm, even if he’d have to be arrested for abuse of a minor if he made this film today alongside the gorgeously youthful Hepburn.
Whatever the exact mix, Funny Face is a magical film, pulled off mostly in Paris just a dozen years after the Germans abandoned the City of Lights and hightailed it for home.
For people like me who had not yet been conceived in 1957, you can watch this unforgettable movie for the art. Or you can view it as a period piece of Americana. Don’t get hung up on the choice. You’ll love the film either way. Plus, you owe it to your education to understand that movies like this were made once upon a time and that the flicks you see today have this DNA in their genetics.
Kay Thompson is no slouch as the ever-confident editor of Quality Magazine. In fact, she provides the hard feminine foil that casts Hepburn’s softness in such a beguiling light. Do people with Thompson’s energy still get born somewhere? I’m sure they must, though it’s no longer cool to let it out in quite such explosive bursts. Thompson’s editorial matriarch wouldn’t have worried too much about that. She’d be too busy crafting her next editorial for ‘the American women … no, make it all the women.’ That, or speaking—with Astaire—some of the finest bad French on celluloid. The two also exchange some indelibly hilarious lines at the French master of empathicalism’s salon.
Yet for all this stunning mélange of artistry, Hepburn is clearly the (soft) focus. Forgive me, I just have to say this once and then it’ll be over: She’s s’wonderful.
What a film. As Professor Emile Flostre might have said —indeed he did—’I can still see them when I close my eyes.’
Canter Bridge 
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