YMMV / Gigi

• Adaptation Displacement: The musical and film are more known than the original short story. There was also a French film made of the story in 1948 which is practically unheard of (it is included as bonus content on this film's Blu-Ray).
• Fridge Horror: During "I Remember It Well" it is revealed that Grandmama and Honoré were lovers—and that she left him. So there's a very real chance that Mama the opera singer could be his child, and thus Gigi his granddaughter and Gaston’s first cousin once removed. Whoops.
• Memetic Mutation: The opening number, "Thank Heaven for Little Girls".
• Memetic Molester: Honoré can come off this way, mostly due to the amount of Values Dissonance surrounding "Thank Heaven for Little Girls."
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Related to the values dissonance below, most everyone in the film is so catty and shallow that it’s hard to like them:
  • Gaston humiliates Lianne, driving her to attempted suicide, when he finds out she was seeing someone else. This would be a dick move normally, but also Lianne is a courtesan, so it makes no sense why Gaston would get so jealous and possessive over an inherently meaningless relationship. He does this again when Gigi starts acting like a courtesan towards the end, dragging her out of the restaurant and making her cry. What exactly did he expect her to act like, given her influences?
  • Honoré is depicted as a charming old bon vivant, but he's the one who encourages Gaston to publicly humiliate Lianne when his nephew would have been happy to write her a note breaking their arrangement off and leaving it at that, and prefers to have love affairs with women far younger than himself.
  • Gigi’s aunt and Grandmother groom her to be a high-class sex toy, insulting her at every turn just for being herself. They shame her mother, too, for daring to leave the profession.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The men celebrate driving a woman to (attempted) suicide, gossip is the order of the day, and Gigi's grandmother and grand-aunt work very hard at training her to be a disposable mistress/professional courtesan. They even negotiate the size of the apartment and number of servants she will get in exchange for her company. To be fair, some of this can be explained as Deliberate Values Dissonance. In turn-of-the-century Paris circa La Belle-Époque, courtesan (extremely classy prostitute) was a semi-respectable career that offered women more financial independence and personal freedom than they would have as a wife. Also, a woman's age of maturity was closer to sixteen than eighteen like it is today in most areas of the world.
  • The first real song of the musical has an old man singing about how darling little girls are, because they grow up and become women. This is treated as him being a charming old man. The 2015 revival gave the song to Gigi's grandmother and grand-aunt to make it palatable.

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