Two Drifters Off To See The World

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (Blu-ray)
Paramount Home Entertainment

Release date: September 12th, 2011
Certificate (UK): PG
Running time: 115 minutes

Year of production: 1961

Director: Blake Edwards
Composer: Henry Mancini

Cast: Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen, Mickey Rooney

As a lover of many great romantic classics, it wasn’t until Christmas 2002 that I first saw Breakfast At Tiffany’s as part of a double bill with An Affair To Remember (1957).

I don’t know why it took me so long to see either of these gems, but they captured my heart that night for two very different reasons.

Based on the novel by Truman Capote, it’s the story of a very classy and slightly eccentric call-girl, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) who lives in New York.

When a young writer, Paul Varjack (George Peppard), moves into the same apartment building as hers, their lives are suddenly thrown off-course by each others’ arrival. While Paul very early on works out what she does for a living, so to does Holly when she discovers he’s being “kept” by a wealthy older woman. Yet they both find something to cling to each other in a city during a time where almost anything goes.

From its opening scene with Holly walking the empty streets of New York in the early morning and past Tiffany’s, it’s hard not fall under Audrey Hepburn’s spell. As Holly, she enchants wherever she goes and for the most part we’re right there with Paul who’s mystified and fascinated with her.

Even at the whimsical party where the oddest of New York’s oddities gather together for cocktails and canopies, Holly shines brighter them all.

We learn more about Holly’s background; where she’s from and why she ran away and that’s something I felt a strong connection with, having been something of a runaway myself. As she sits in her window strumming away on her guitar to Moon River, the song would cement itself firmly in every fibre of my being because I too was a drifter who was off to see the world.

Did I fall in love with Breakfast At Tiffany’s partly because at the same time I was falling in love in real life? I think that had a lot to do with it, but it’s such a difficult film not to fall in love with as well. For anyone who’s ever left home to try and find something better for themselves, it’s a film that tenderly shows you that at some point no matter how far you run, you do eventually have to face those things before really being able to move forward. Like Paul says:

The final scene where it’s pouring with rain and Holly needs to find this dirty, wet, nameless cat is just as breathtaking and heartbreaking as when Cary Grant discovers why Deborah Kerr didn’t meet him at the Empire State Building.

Although we arrive there through different routes, our hearts pour with the same emotion and because we can guess the rest, these two very different films give much hope to hopeless romantics like me.