Lili Reviews

(OK) As simple as 'hi lili hi lo (the song)', soft choreographry, 2 dreams as vvid as real scenes and the romantic poetic naiveté of Leslie in beaiiful contrat to everybodies adultness....

This is a weird one. Not quite a musical but really a melodrama either, Lili exists somewhere in the netherworld between those twin points. Lili (Leslie Caron) is a young girl, roughly sixteen, recently orphaned who runs off to the carnival. Here she meets a magician (Jean-Pierre Aumont), his jealous wife (Zsa Zsa Gabor), and a brooding puppeteer (Mel Ferrer). It is through the relationship with the puppets in the show that Lili not only blossoms, but the puppeteer is able to communicate his love for her.

 

Yeah, that last bit is a bit skeevy not matter who you try to look at or frame it. Mel Ferrer smolders with an intense, dark sexuality that makes him appear like a hungry wolf leering over Caron’s innocent lamb, even when the script is not intending that. As it stands, the love story is dispassionate and pervading in melancholy, a tone that the rest of the film also strikes.

 

Lili is really a star vehicle for Caron, and she rises to the occasion beautifully. A trained dancer, Caron gives her Lili a body language and carriage that changes and grows as her character does. The ways that she holds her body in the earliest scenes are awkward and stiff and loosen up as she experiences her sexual awakening and the agony of her first unrequited love. She’s charming when interacting with the puppets and unbelievable in her two big dance numbers.

 

The climatic ballet is particularly memorable as Lili dances with life-size versions of the puppets that transform into Ferrer. This is not only her realization that she loves her Svengali, but a lovely reminder of Lili’s overall essence of fairy tale-like fantasy. Great musical stars know that they need to act while dancing/singing just as much as they need to act when they’re being tasked with jokes or dramatics. Caron intelligently develops Lili from naïve waif to more mature individual throughout, but never more beautifully than in her two dream ballets.

 

While Lili’s parts never quite come together there’s something undeniably enchanting here. Chalk it up to Caron’s gamine features and uncontrollable sensitivity as she is the film’s heart and soul. By the end, I just wanted to embrace her and say, “good job.”