Breakfast at Tiffany's
Sep. 18th, 2005 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaThe advantage of having a summer subletter as unversed as I in
chick-flick culture (yes, I know some people object to that term
(coughDanielcough), but everyone recognizes it and it is on the whole
unoffensive, so I will not reject it) is that we can both educate
ourselves without wearying the more culturally literate, and discuss it,
saying the commonly said things without sounding trite and repetitive.
At least, not to each other.
This movie I have heard called "weird" by multiple people, and I was prepared for a bit of oddness in it, but it was nothing like that. The only thing out of the ordinary about it was that Audrey Hepburn was starring in something that was not a charming, innocent romantic comedy. This is dark, it made me feel lonely and unhappy, it made me cry, and Audrey Hepburn's glamour, for about the first time in my experience, was clearly not something to be envied. (It also appears, however, that here is the movie that established all the famous tropes of her fashion, particularly the large sunglasses.) The parties she throws in her apartment and her involvement in them reminded me very much of some of the parties I've been to or heard about, and it bothered me how much I could relate to her situation in the movie. Not that I feel myself in any danger of ending up in something similar, but more that I can see how it could happen so easily, and how I was impressed and touched by a movie that I can clearly see is "an old person movie." Heather and I were talking about how old Audrey Hepburn was supposed to be (she's clearly aging in the movie, especially since I've seen a number of her much younger films this summer, although she's always lovely), and I realized it doesn't matter. She's not forty yet, of course, but it's unimportant whether she's eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-five or thirty-five*, or how long she's been carrying on this life-style. Since she was married at thirteen, any of those ages will work, and even though I know it's fiction, and even though I know that she probably hasn't realized consciously what she's doing to herself and thinks that everything is going along fine, it's terrible to think of her having lived that way for so long before she meets Paul. After food and shelter have been provided, loneliness is one of the worst things someone has to face, and it's all the more tragic because she doesn't know about it until she's lived that way for years.
*Okay, I know that thirty-five isn't really the type of age for an "old-person" movie, but it's a step up from the things that feature young, handsome, and immortal Cary Grants, isn't it?
This movie I have heard called "weird" by multiple people, and I was prepared for a bit of oddness in it, but it was nothing like that. The only thing out of the ordinary about it was that Audrey Hepburn was starring in something that was not a charming, innocent romantic comedy. This is dark, it made me feel lonely and unhappy, it made me cry, and Audrey Hepburn's glamour, for about the first time in my experience, was clearly not something to be envied. (It also appears, however, that here is the movie that established all the famous tropes of her fashion, particularly the large sunglasses.) The parties she throws in her apartment and her involvement in them reminded me very much of some of the parties I've been to or heard about, and it bothered me how much I could relate to her situation in the movie. Not that I feel myself in any danger of ending up in something similar, but more that I can see how it could happen so easily, and how I was impressed and touched by a movie that I can clearly see is "an old person movie." Heather and I were talking about how old Audrey Hepburn was supposed to be (she's clearly aging in the movie, especially since I've seen a number of her much younger films this summer, although she's always lovely), and I realized it doesn't matter. She's not forty yet, of course, but it's unimportant whether she's eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-five or thirty-five*, or how long she's been carrying on this life-style. Since she was married at thirteen, any of those ages will work, and even though I know it's fiction, and even though I know that she probably hasn't realized consciously what she's doing to herself and thinks that everything is going along fine, it's terrible to think of her having lived that way for so long before she meets Paul. After food and shelter have been provided, loneliness is one of the worst things someone has to face, and it's all the more tragic because she doesn't know about it until she's lived that way for years.
*Okay, I know that thirty-five isn't really the type of age for an "old-person" movie, but it's a step up from the things that feature young, handsome, and immortal Cary Grants, isn't it?