Funny Face

Audrey Hepburn sparkles (when didn’t she?) in this 1957 musical from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ director Stanley Donen, but two things keep the film from dazzling as brightly as ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and ‘Roman Holiday’. Firstly, this is a Cinderella story in which a bookshop worker-cum-philosophy nerd (Hepburn) is discovered by a glossy fashion mag and whisked off to Paris to become a model. Trouble is, she looks much cooler before her transformation into a princess, in geek chic loafers, a roll-neck sweater, trenchcoat and eyebrows Cara Delevingne would kill for. Secondly, her prince charming, a photographer played by Fred Astaire, looks old enough to be her dad (he was 58, Hepburn was 28). Is he going to put a hip out, you worry, as they dance? Still, there are some gorgeous comic touches. The film fizzes as the fashion mob waltz into Hepburn’s bookshop to shoot a story and lock her out (‘dreadful girl’). And the bubble-headed characters are comedy gold, from the phoney French philosopher sleazing over Hepburn to the fashion mag editor (‘think pink!’) who plucks her out of obscurity – a daffy, dancing version of Miranda Priestly in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’.