Breakfast at Tiffany’s at 60: the sharp romcom that darkens with age | Breakfast at Tiffany’s

So I grew up thinking of Breakfast at Tiffany’s as a movie that belonged – via the tape, in the most literal and physical sense – specifically to one person. And then, by extension, for me, like a kind of inheritance. We watched it a few times in my childhood, when I was a little too young to understand what Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly did with her life – although, in my defense, the movie sidesteps the issue as well. . Regardless: it was probably one of my first encounters with the sheer power of movie stars, or at least one of the first times that I recognized it as such. Audrey Hepburn, so perfectly doe-eyed and beehive and brilliantly funny and sadly sad, seemed as much of a magical force to me as Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, though the person she played made less sense. for me . And not least – probably mostly, if I’m honest – there was a cat. Cats were an easy and cheap for my heart in a movie: the boost of panic and relief I felt about getting rid of rashes and cute recovery from Holly’s ginger mog comes back to me every time I look at it again.

All this to say that Blake Edwards’ mostly modest romantic comedy has become for me one of those weird texts by which you mark your own shifts in understanding and perspective. Every few years it looked a little different: a dark surf appeared in Holly’s daily merry-go-round of parties and suitors, as did the poignant aspirationalism of her morning window shopping strolls. The film may understate the irony and subtle sadness of Truman Capote’s new source – reading this too makes the film forever play differently – but its balance between the bitter to sweet lines also has a taste. different with age. (I also understood why we usually move quickly through Mickey Rooney’s yellow face scenes as Holly’s cranky Japanese owner: I had thought of them just as a no-fun diversion, though they certainly were too. )

With the film now 60, and I nearly 40, my affection for it endures – despite the ways in which it softens and compromises Capote’s sharper, tangier character study, or perhaps because of them. . It is perhaps one of the great Hollywood examples of good literary adaptation giving an entirely new gift, rather than a faithful and secondary evocation. The film’s sweet love affair between two (admittedly very pretty) outlier social values ​​- one a cautious extrovert, the other a writer trying to break into the world around him – perhaps has nothing to do with it. with the more detached and unromantic portrayal of a woman alone in her overcrowded society. tourbillon, aiming to draw entirely different emotions from its audience. But there is still a kind of tender truth to her sentimentality and a heartbreaking vulnerability to the performance of Hepburn’s lost little girl that cuts through the cliché of that very description.

As a rural Midwestern dweller whose loaned uptown chic is a well-crafted disguise, helping her escape an adventure-free life and marriage, Hepburn’s Holly Golightly is kind of an exaggerated emblem of who we all become – at least for a time – when we move away from home and have the freedom to reintroduce ourselves into the world. You can see why Capote, who lobbied the studio to choose Marilyn Monroe for the role, wasn’t happy with Hepburn’s casting: there’s no part of her, even buried deep inside, that talks about Central America. But as the it-girl portrayed Holly, gradually losing track of her past, she is both fragile and moving – we would have her urge to travel hurt even if we hadn’t given her Moon River to sing in a perfect scene. , but this is not the case. not bad – and irresistibly fiery. Decades later, her performance comes across as some sort of maniacal dreamgirl pixie prototype, long before that stock character was overwhelmed and infantilized by hyper-eccentricity.

Meanwhile, whatever the movie’s happy ending kisses in the rain, she remains a romantic heroine primarily defined by a willful independence: it’s significant, and perhaps even fitting, that Hepburn’s main man (the perfectly likable George Peppard, a few years before Team A’s grizzled fame) was not at all at his level of fame or luminosity. Her DNA can be traced through an assortment of single (or singular) women in New York City in film and television, from Annie Hall to Carrie Bradshaw to Frances Ha – she’s unlike any of them, well. sure, but you can bet solidly on all of those characters who saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s at some point and fed dreams of their own Holly Golightly reinvention.

That’s what makes Holly and Hepburn’s reading of her worthy of the much abused “iconic” label – more, for better or worse, than Capote’s more barbed creation. She may indeed be more of an icon than a character at this point, her little black dress, bun and cigarette holder are now a recognized code – and costume – for a cosmopolitan urban femininity, even among people. who have never seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Likewise, anyone who continues to stick the instantly recognizable movie poster, complete with its multi-colored border and magazine-style artwork, on their dormitory wall isn’t necessarily a fan of the movie. Rather, it represents abstract nostalgia – not a lived experience, but the glamor of a past life – even among people too young to remember the indie-pop earworm of Deep Blue Something Breakfast at Tiffany’s, gradually receding and fortunately in the cultural heritage of the film.

It’s hard to think of many films that have been so broadly broken down into enduring images and echoing the symbology, quite apart from its own fandom. Turns out the young me was dead wrong, whatever the aura of that rough VHS tape may be: at 60, it turns out Breakfast at Tiffany’s sort of belongs to everyone, that they know it or not.