What kind of film is Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
On IMDb it says "romance, drama and comedy"... On Wikipedia it says "Romantic Comedy"... Well that’s just ridiculous. I mean a
romance? Really?
Holly Golightly is possibly the least romantic woman in Cinema!
Okay so that’s a bit of a stretch, I’m sure there are plenty
of less romantic women... I mean the Witch and from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe wasn’t exactly waiting for her
price charming to rescue her from the nasty Aslan.
But regardless Miss
Golightly is not romantic; in fact she’s not a whole lot more than a flirt, a
gold digger and a user. In fact, if she was famous in our time then Okay Magazine would have readers drooling
over the beautiful scandals that she creates!
In the original novella, which is extremely different to the
film, Holly is actually little more than a prostitute and really, although she
is also a New York Socialite, she’s pretty much given the same arrangements in the
film too. She’s often given "a fifty for the powder room” and the men she
brings back to her house are always expecting a little more than she gives
them. If she doesn’t see herself as a prostitute then it’s probably fair to say
that the men she “dates” do.
The film doesn’t even have a lot of romance to it, there are
of course the final scenes, but for the majority of the film Hepburn’s
character is totally uninterested in love, in fact it barely comes up as a
topic. What does come up is the need for money, duty towards family and being
given money for “dates”. Other than the family bit there’s not a lot which
suggests ideas of love.
So it’s surprising that this film has been categorised as a
romance so often. You could say that the romance is between Holly and her man
friend Paul (called Fred by Holly) and that would make sense, what with them
sharing a few kisses and ending up together, but right from the beginning Holly
wants him to be her friend, in a very childlike way. Her exact words were, “We’re
friends that’s all... We are friends aren’t we?” which to me is reminiscent of
a self-conscious little school girl trying to make friends with someone she
really doubts will like her.
Actually she’s very childlike in the way she acts, despite
all the sexy outfits and flirting with rich men. For example she often says
things like “It can’t be four thirty, it just can’t,” showing a childish disbelief in the time or
the day or just disagreeing for the sake of it in a very whimsical and light
hearted way. She’s erratic, moving from one thing to the next without much
thought, and has a need to have as little possessions as possible, so that she
can take her leave whenever she needs to. She’s a confusing, exciting and
altogether quite crazy woman who has a hidden past and, in her words, doesn’t like
snoops.
To me Breakfast at
Tiffany’s isn’t a romance, though it has romantic moments, or a comedy,
though it can be quite funny, but is more a mystery.
Not a murder mystery, of course, or anything of that sort,
but more a personal mystery. It’s much like Hitchcock’s film Marnie, which Hitchcock himself labelled
as a “Sexual Mystery”. Marnie is about a young woman whose past has caused her
to want to steal from men and avoid relationships at all costs. There is a
mystery in her past as to how she got this way and the audience, and Sean
Connery’s Mark, are left to piece together what that mystery may be.
Breakfast
at Tiffany’s, although much less brazen about sex, works in a very similar
way. There is something wrong with Holly Golightly, she’s too carefree, she’s
too money obsessed and she needs people to like her so she flirts with everyone
regardless of how it will affect them, or her. The mystery lies in the question
of how she got this way.
It’s something many of us ask ourselves from time to time I’m
sure. We do something monumentally stupid or selfish and we think, “I’d never
have done that a year or two or ten, or however many, years ago.” At that leads
us onto the question of, “What happened that made me like this?”... And if you
haven’t ever thought about that then maybe you’ve seen a character say it on
TV, probably over a whiskey or something.
Now normally it’s a stupid self-pitying question which really
doesn’t have to be asked because there’s nothing wrong with you, I mean it’s
just a stupid mistake, right? We’re just beating ourselves up.
But Holly doesn’t ask herself that question. She knows its there but she’s hiding from it. You can see it when Paul leaves her after the famous line, “It should take you exactly four seconds to cross from here to the door. I give you two”. She’s pushed him away and she doesn’t really know why, but she can’t ask herself why either.
Maybe she can’t ask herself that question because it’s too
painful, or maybe because it’s our jobs as the audience to make that judgement,
or maybe because that’s what Paul is there for. Either way it makes Holly seem
even sadder and the mystery even more important.
The important thing to remember when watching, or thinking
about or talking about, Breakfast at
Tiffany’s is that it is not simply another Rom-com, or a Romance, or a
romantic drama (although that’s closer than the other two). It’s not a “girly
film” or a “chick flick” (not that I have anything against chick flicks). What Breakfast is more complicated than that.
It’s about character, it’s about mystery and more than anything it’s about those
people who need to be liked but never want to be loved and about why someone
might be like that.
It’s complicated... It’s incredibly complicated!
I mean, it's a "Romantic-Mystery Drama-Comedy with psychological thriller-like
parts and a philosophical take on the morality of gold digging"!
Or to put it in a simpler way... it’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
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