A Film Canon

A far more artful fusion of cinema with Kelly's particular brand of tap/ballet than On The Town, An American In Paris presents him in the guise of Jerry Mulligan, an ex-G.I. whose livelihood - painting - is contrasted with those of his friends - a cabaret singer (Georges Guetary) and concert pianist (Oscar Levant) - in terms of its focus on producing and selling his own material. Not only does this provide an elegant cipher for Minnelli's ambition to imbue each Technicolour arrangement with the aura of an original, despite its mechanical, mass-produced origins, but it diagnoses Kelly's peculiarly passive, oblivious style of dancing - his whole body breathing - as the result of a supersaturation of colour that impedes any further agency, or even consciousness, placing it in the same relation to colour cinema as Astaire's stands to sound cinema. Hence the curious fact that the Parisian universe seems to have halted somewhere around impressionism, allowing Kelly's hyperbolic eye to continually deflect its distracting, flickering ecstasies into his feet. From this perspective, the final, trademark synecdoche for the whole film - set to Gershwin's symphony - feels less grating than it otherwise might, partly because of the extent to which Minnelli retains an impressionistic palette, as well as the elegant integration of musical numbers (or fragments) and narrative that has preceded it, facilitated partly by the musical proclivities of Mulligan's friends, and partly by the use of musical numbers to overcome those communication barriers (English and German for 'By Strauss', English and French for 'I Got Rhythm') that culminate with his romance with Lise (Leslie Caron); a vision of music as a universal language capable of redeeming and homogenising the post-war melting pot.