We're after the same rainbow's end...
Recently I have started to ponder the ending of the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. I consider Audrey Hepburn a good actress so when she is an, ever so polite, ham in this film, I have to blame the director, Blake Edwards. I also feel Audrey Hepburn's genuine beauty and sweet demeanor just eclipses the hard core facts that are Holly Golightly. The character should have been played by someone like Joan Van Fleet, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck or Ava Gardner, all just too old for a character Capote wrote to be only 19 years old. As it was, Hepburn's real age met the screenplay's Golightly halfway. While Audrey had experienced a rough life, she wore it gracefully. I have yet to see a photo that even suggests a jaded Audrey Hepburn.
Holly is opportunistic, she gets the "mean reds" because she isn't a nice person and she knows it. She's a mean drunk who abandoned her brother and step-children when she ran away from her husband. She is a con and a fake, who mistreats her cat. She doesn't feel deserving of anything truly good. When Holly meets Paul Varjak, who is a complex character himself, she becomes pure and free for all of one day. Her fears get the best of her and she retracts.
My problem with the ending is that it implies happily ever after with that last kiss,"moon river and me". She still has her fears to overcome, she needs to forgive herself and stop getting those "mean reds", she needs to learn to love herself. Poor Paul Varjak, he is going to have to be a very patient man. I wonder if he has all he needs in his love for Holly to pull him through the bumpy road he has ahead with someone so damaged. I feel the scene should have ended with her make-up running in the rain, distraught, hand on face, the mess she really is, looking at Paul Varjak with Cat still missing. That image is the real Holly Golightly, the one that is up all night and sleeps in during the day. I feel that would have been a fitting ending for emotionally complex characters that want a life together.
Holly is opportunistic, she gets the "mean reds" because she isn't a nice person and she knows it. She's a mean drunk who abandoned her brother and step-children when she ran away from her husband. She is a con and a fake, who mistreats her cat. She doesn't feel deserving of anything truly good. When Holly meets Paul Varjak, who is a complex character himself, she becomes pure and free for all of one day. Her fears get the best of her and she retracts.
My problem with the ending is that it implies happily ever after with that last kiss,"moon river and me". She still has her fears to overcome, she needs to forgive herself and stop getting those "mean reds", she needs to learn to love herself. Poor Paul Varjak, he is going to have to be a very patient man. I wonder if he has all he needs in his love for Holly to pull him through the bumpy road he has ahead with someone so damaged. I feel the scene should have ended with her make-up running in the rain, distraught, hand on face, the mess she really is, looking at Paul Varjak with Cat still missing. That image is the real Holly Golightly, the one that is up all night and sleeps in during the day. I feel that would have been a fitting ending for emotionally complex characters that want a life together.
2 Comments:
i am so totally with you on this one! after PARIS WHEN IT SIZZLES, i daresay i've even gone off hepburn a little.
but that's all in the past now, innit? ;)))
n♥
HA! Parris when it Sizzles is so self reflexive it hardly seems like a film at all but a parody of every film the two ever made and the roncom genre at the time :)
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