Here I am on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, distracted by football on one channel and Irma coverage on another, pondering what depth I can pull out of a film which is very nearly one-fourth (or even one-third) dance sequences. Then it comes to me. Perhaps not a brilliant idea, but an idea nonetheless. Reality. Yup, that’s pretty much it. The main thing that irks me about An American In Paris is its lack of reality, which is pretty funny since I enjoy such movies as Mary Poppins, Inception, and The Lord of the Rings—furthermore, I think Lost is the best show to ever run on television (with maybe the exception of its sixth season). But the main reason why I don’t really take to An American in Paris is that it just doesn’t seem real enough to make sense to me.

The film opens with the protagonist, Jerry Mulligan, introducing himself to the film’s viewers: “This is Paris. And I’m an American who lives here. My name, Jerry Mulligan, and I’m an ex-GI. In 1945, when the Army told me to find my own job, I stayed on. And I’ll tell you why. I’m a painter. All my life that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do…Back home, everyone said I didn’t have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French.” We see where Jerry lives—a cramped-but-charming closet of an apartment in a corner of a very perfectly romantic-looking Paris. From its commencement, then, An American in Paris presents an almost pro-French, anti-American bent. Jerry has performed a great service for his country, serving overseas in World War II, but his government has seemingly abandoned him after the war, instructing him to “find [his] own job” like every ordinary American citizen must. Likewise, Jerry had no artistic talent in America; but in France he is accepted as an artist, and his works are far from poor.

We then meet Jerry’s friend, Adam Cook, an out-of-work concert pianist who reveals that he has just won his eighth scholarship/fellowship to study abroad and feels like “the world’s oldest child prodigy.” Adam is the film’s funniest character (and my favorite), but it is quite clear that Adam doesn’t possess a ton of drive. Most of the time he is on camera, he is either sipping coffee or plunking on his piano—or relishing an elaborate daydream about giving a performance of Gershwin’s “Piano Concerto in F,” in which Adam plays most of the instruments, directs the symphony, and even applauds the piece as a member of the audience. Whereas the American government has failed Jerry, Adam seems to have failed whatever American school or organization keeps awarding him scholarships by not taking advantage of the opportunities given him to make something successful out of his life.

After Adam, we are introduced to the suave Henri Baurel, a music-hall performer who took in and sheltered the daughter of resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation. That little girl, Lise Bouvier, is now grown up and supposedly in love with Henri. The couple is planning on marrying soon, though Henri is old enough to be Lise’s father. What Henri himself was doing during the war is unclear. He doesn’t seem to have been a soldier; so while his care of Lise is admirable, questions arise as to the extent of his support of the Allied cause in World War II.

Adam is disturbed that Henri (left) and Jerry (right) are in love with the same girl without realizing it.

As romance films go, there is of course a love triangle with the characters of Henri, Lise, and Jerry. But there’s another female character in the mix as well, Milo Roberts, the wealthy American heiress who supposedly is interested in promoting Jerry’s career as an artist. Oddly, Milo explains her name by referencing the Venus de Milo, an ancient Greek statue often seen as a portrayal of ideal femininity. I think this comparison makes Milo seem like a fake, a fabricated name for an unreal person. It is also interesting that Milo feels the need to explain the origin of her money, a sun-tan oil company that she or a family member owns. Her joking comment “There’s a lot of red skin in America” again somewhat denigrates Americans. While Jerry and the rest of the GIs in France are living in near-poverty, people back home in America are in need of sun-tan oil for their recreational activities. Not a real “sunny” picture of Americans. But it leaves this viewer wondering why Milo is even in Paris at all.

Which brings us to the issue of how Paris is utterly romanticized throughout the film. It is perfectly beautiful and stirs the characters to heights of love and peace. Even in the film’s final sequence (the ballet and the final scene on the stairs), the city dominates, blooming with colors and flowers from which the characters seem to take life and respond with love for each other as well as for the city, which only saw the end of Nazi control in the late summer of 1944, a short few years before the film’s setting.

The American guy always gets the girl? Lise and Jerry on their first date.

For Me Then…

I want to love this musical. But it just doesn’t do it for me. I understand how the government often fails its citizens and how people lack the motivation to live up to the expectations of others who believe in them—and we viewers are led to feel affection for both Jerry and Adam. (Spoiler alert!) But it is Henri who really deserves our sympathies, isn’t it? He is the one from whom the film demands the sacrifice of his love, Lise, to Jerry and who leaves the story alone, apparently on his way to America to become a star. He is successful in his occupational life, but not his personal life.

Henri even gets jilted in the film’s title. Its main noun is singular (“An American”), whereas the story encompasses the Paris exploits of two American men, one American woman, one French man, and one French woman. What are we to conclude then about the occurrence of an American presence in the capital of France after the world’s greatest war? It seems to me that the film indicates that an American man, cast off by his own country, would learn to integrate himself into the everyday life of France to the extent that he takes French women away from French men, which is okay because that French man was too effeminate enough to participate in any legitimate combat and is therefore satisfied with being single and off to the great land of America, a country which forgets its servicemen and finances losers who happen to be closet comedians. And in the end, the American-failure-turned-artist waltzes away with the young and impressionable French girl. Hopefully, this isn’t reality.