Girl on film: "Funny Face"

As with its near-contemporary Gigi, a fair bit about Stanley Donen's 1957 musical Funny Face can now be filed away under the heading "just plain wrong". Any contemporary remake would have to try and matchmake someone like William H. Macy with Keira Knightley, which gives you some idea of how wrong it is; it's also another of those late 1950s/early 60s films that insists upon a makeover for a woman who looks like Audrey Hepburn in the first place. Ideologically, its narrative insists, at almost every turn, upon the triumph of American commerce and philistinism over The New Ideas drifting through and across from Europe, which are dismissed as pretentious and untenable; certain scenes look as though Donen were specifically thumbing his nose at his sometime cohort Gene Kelly's altogether fonder and more reverent depiction of French Bohemia in 1951's An American in Paris.

Yet no matter: it hails from a period when the musical still gave life to its parties, and had colour in its cheeks, and you may just be prepared to overlook all of the above to revel in the pleasure the film continues to generate. Donen was only five years on from Singin' in the Rain, and still capable of staging remarkably limber and dynamic exposition scenes between the (above-average, Gershwin-enhanced) musical numbers: clock the way he eventually gets Hepburn's reluctant model Jo out of glum domesticity with polo-necked professeur Emile Flostre (Michel Auclair) via the brisk deployment of a priceless statuette. His work with the actors remains energising: Astaire's mesmerising bullfighter routine proved he could be as fleet-footed with a mere jacket and umbrella as he ever was with Ginger in his arms, and the two coaxed Hepburn into giving one of her least self-conscious and most cheering performances.

For once, the latter appears to resist mere clothes-horsery: instead, we see Jo weighing the choice between making the world more beautiful with her brains, and becoming a well-paid front for an industry that forces young girls into self-starving and Filipino teenagers into twenty-hour shifts. (Well, who'd you rather be: Lily Cole, or Cara Delevingne?) Among a lot of romcom coincidence and nonsense, the ending works because we sense that Astaire, too, hasn't entirely succumbed to cynicism, and that he might still have some art left in him. The film, likewise: Donen divides the screen like a Mondrian in the early bookstore sequence, and forever drapes the screen - most memorably in the opening "Think Pink" number - in hues eminently deserving of this new digital spruce. The film remains the best use of Technicolor up until La Chinoise - though Godard would have shot this story back to front, as the tale of an unhappy model who finds true enlightenment only after she dresses down and picks up a book.

Funny Face is on release in selected cinemas, and screens on Film4 this Wednesday at 4.50pm.