Mistakes in the movie
"Breakfast at Tiffany's" can be considered one of the most famous works of Blake Edwards. This movie has long been considered a classic, and this, of course, is a great merit of Truman Capote, on the basis of whose work the film was made. "Nothing belongs to us in this world. It's just that we and things sometimes find each other." The plot of the film is uncomplicated. Young but still almost unknown writer Paul Warjak (George Peppard) meets a very unusual neighbor Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), who lives all alone. Sometimes she arranges parties where there are people who are completely unknown to her. Everyone treats her differently: someone considers Holly a selfish girl, someone is crazy, and someone just admires her. Paul eventually begins to fall in love with her, and everything would be fine if it were not for the peculiar character of Miss Golightly. “Do not let wild animals close to your heart. The more love you give them, the more power they have. And one day they will become so strong that they will want to run away into the forest, fly up to the very tops of the trees. The role of Holly Golightly, if not the best, then certainly one of the best roles of Audrey Hepburn in her entire career. Stunning camera work only emphasizes its sophistication and beauty. The main character is presented to the viewer as a very optimistic girl with a good sense of humor. No matter how Holly pretends, she is far from stupid, which once hints to Paul. "I don't mind. Sometimes it pays to look stupid." There aren't many active characters here. For Edwards, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is not just a beautiful and sad love story, it is an attempt to create a living person on the screen. Everything that happens, happens one way or another through her fault. A peculiar outlook on life makes the heroine Hepburn a real person who is endowed with her feelings and thoughts. When you look at Holly, you forget that this is a fictional character by other people. The heroine from the screen seems to come to life and it seems that she is about to speak to you. Golightly loves freedom more than anything. She, like her cat, does not have her own name. “My old cat, old lazy, lazy with no name. I have no right to give him a name, we do not belong to each other. We just met once. Nothing in this world belongs to us. It’s just that sometimes we and things find each other.” A capricious girl whose favorite pastime is going to Tiffany's is trying to marry a rich man. No, she's not looking for love. She is looking for money. Money is as important to her as her own freedom. Holly is not interested in books, she divides people into "rats" and "not rats". The famous final dialogue between her and Paul about how "people do not belong to each other" puts an end to the story. Has love changed Holly herself? I hardly believe it. "-I don't want to put you in a cage. I want to love you. - It's the same!" Either way, Blake Edwards made an excellent film with a superbly written script. This story takes the soul and makes you empathize with the characters. Who is really Holly Golightly? Adventurer? Call girl? Yes, it really doesn't matter. The only important thing is that we should all learn to live the way she lived. If you've already watched the movie, watch it again. If only to see Audrey Hepburn playing Moon River again.
The impossible should be demanded from life. And then the impossible becomes reality. Without a back thought about the brilliant, without idealizing the present and without a conscience gnawing at the subconscious. You need to be simpler and always maintain a childish naivety. So it is easier to achieve what you want, no matter what the consequences are. If a person is easy-going and emotional, he will always be fine. He is an optimist out of his own will, a burner, a madman. He is perceived as an adult child, they treat his actions with a smile and constantly forgive everything.
It was such a person who once appeared in the life of the protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffany's, leaving behind a lot of pleasant and unpleasant memories. He was a girl with a dark past, distant plans and indestructible naivety. Truman Capote describes what is happening in such a way as if it happened to him and it was he who decided to remember the events that had once occurred through the fault of a friend who reminded him of them.
The protagonist of the work is a writer. He is embarrassed by his work and is not ready to acquaint his inner circle with him, fearing to receive critical feedback. A significant part of writers is just like that - they are ready to share their experiences with paper, but are not ready to discuss them. It is possible to increase self-esteem only at the expense of naive people who are able to discern in them something that really makes it necessary to become proud and lose a sense of reality. Even in the case of a critical look, the writer will still remain confident in the correctness of his craft.
They can call him at night, smile sweetly and constantly apologize: everything will get away with a person whose immediacy goes into infinity. If the wind is walking in the head, then there is no point in blocking the open space with a wall - the wind will surely destroy it. There is no way to resist, you can be skeptical and try to make a number of changes. One time is able to influence what is happening, changing circumstances and bringing discord into the worldview. A naive person will someday get burned and think. Then no one will ring the doorbell at night anymore.
And if no one rings the doorbell, stops disturbing and leaves forever - a void will already appear inside the person who wanted that. The prepared solution for the construction of the wall will come in handy. Its construction will fence off memories and allow you to live, forgetting about the existence of the wind. And the pain will pierce the body, and you will want to remember the past: write a book about it, sharing with the world the emotions you once experienced, giving rise to a storm in the soul of the reader, whose opinion will depend on how he is ready to relate to the existence of windy people.
Success is sure to come, as a rise follows a fall - you need to wait for the required changes. The cyclicity of processes is one of the laws of the universe. Based on both of these statements, you understand how difficult it is to wait out a bad stage of life, how difficult it is to realize a sharp break in a good stage. But you always need to believe in the best, not attaching importance to negative episodes. Let the threat of imprisonment or eternal exile mean nothing if the soul demands the realization of the most grandiose goals, the main of which is a better life.
Who is not easy to rise, he is doomed to remain in the four walls of despondency. When a country with a warm climate, wealth and a beautiful life looms ahead, is it worth appealing to the inner self, trying to find justifications for the rigidity of the only opinion that determines the personal essence? A feeling of shame arises: for one who has stopped developing himself, for the confident step of others. There is no recipe for happiness for everyone at once, but everyone is happy at the same time, because negativity is always equal to happiness, you just need to understand it correctly.
Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany's
I am always drawn to the places where I once lived, to the houses, to the streets. There is, for example, a large dark house on one of the seventies streets of the East Side, in which I settled at the beginning of the war, when I first arrived in New York. There I had a room filled with all sorts of junk: a sofa, pot-bellied armchairs upholstered in rough red plush, at the sight of which one recalls a stuffy day in a soft carriage. The walls were painted with adhesive paint the color of tobacco chewing gum. Everywhere, even in the bathroom, hung engravings of Roman ruins, freckled with age. The only window overlooked the fire escape. But all the same, as soon as I felt for the key in my pocket, my soul became more cheerful: this housing, for all its dullness, was my first own housing, there were my books, glasses with pencils that could be repaired - in a word, everything, it seemed to me, to become a writer.
In those days it never occurred to me to write about Holly Golightly, and I probably wouldn't even now, if it weren't for a conversation with Joe Bell that stirred my memories again.
Holly Golightly lived in the same house, she rented an apartment below me. And Joe Bell ran a bar around the corner on Lexington Avenue; he still holds it. Both Holly and I went there six times, seven times a day, not to drink - not only for this - but to make phone calls: during the war it was difficult to get a phone. In addition, Joe Bell willingly ran errands, which was burdensome: Holly always had a great many of them.
Of course, this is all a long story, and until last week I had not seen Joe Bell for several years. From time to time we called each other; sometimes, when I was nearby, I went to his bar, but we were never friends, and our only friendship with Holly Golightly connected us. Joe Bell is not an easy person, he himself admits this and explains that he is a bachelor and that he has high acidity. Anyone who knows him will tell you that it is difficult to communicate with him. It's just not possible if you don't share his affections, and Holly is one of them. Others include hockey, Weimar hunting dogs, Our Baby Sunday (a show he's been listening to for fifteen years), and Gilbert and Sullivan—he claims one of them is related to him, I don't remember who.
So when the phone rang late last Tuesday afternoon and I heard “Joe Bell speaking,” I immediately knew it was about Holly. But he only said: “Can you drop in on me? It's important,” and the croaking voice on the phone was hoarse with excitement.
In the pouring rain, I hailed a taxi and on the way I even thought: what if she is here, what if I see Holly again?
But there was no one there but the owner. Joe Bell's Bar is not a very crowded place compared to other pubs on Lexington Avenue. It boasts neither a neon sign nor a TV. In two old mirrors you can see what the weather is like outside, and behind the counter, in a niche, among photographs of hockey stars, there is always a large vase with a fresh bouquet - they are lovingly arranged by Joe Bell himself. That's what he was doing when I came in.
“You understand,” he said, lowering the gladiolus into the vase, “you understand, I would not force you to drag yourself so far, but I need to know your opinion. Strange story! A very strange story happened.
- News from Holly?
He touched the paper as if considering what to say. Short, with wiry gray hair, a protruding jaw, and a bony face that would have suited a much taller man, he had always looked tanned, and now he was even more reddened.
No, not entirely from her. Rather, it is not yet clear. That is why I want to consult with you. Let me pour you. It's a new cocktail, the White Angel, he said, half-mixing vodka and gin, no vermouth.
While I drank this composition, Joe Bell stood nearby and sucked on a stomach pill, wondering what he would tell me. Finally said:
“Remember this Mr. I.Ya. Younioshi?” Gentleman from Japan?
- From California.
I remembered Mr. Yunioshi very well. He is a photographer for an illustrated magazine and at one time occupied a studio on the top floor of the house where I lived.
- Don't confuse me. Do you know what I'm talking about? Very well. Well, this same Mr. Y. Y. Yunioshi showed up here last night and rolled up to the counter. I haven't seen him in probably over two years. Where do you think he's been all this time?
- In Africa.
Joe Bell stopped sucking his pill and his eyes narrowed.
– How do you know?
- I read it at Winchel's. - So it really was.
He cracked open the cash drawer and pulled out a thick paper envelope.
“Maybe you read that in Winchel’s too?”
There were three photographs in the envelope, more or less the same, although taken from different angles: a tall, slender Negro in a cotton skirt, with a shy and at the same time self-satisfied smile, showed a strange wooden sculpture - an elongated head of a girl with short, smoothed, like a boy's, hair and a tapering face; her polished wooden eyes, with a slanting cut, were unusually large, and her large, sharply defined mouth looked like that of a clown. At first glance, the sculpture looked like an ordinary primitive, but only at first, because it was the spitting image of Holly Golightly - if I may say so about a dark inanimate object.
- Well, what do you think about it? said Joe Bell, pleased at my confusion.
- Looks like her.
“Listen,” he slapped his hand on the counter, “this is it. It's clear as daylight. The Japanese immediately recognized her as soon as he saw her.
Did he see her? In Africa?
- Her? No, just a sculpture. What's the difference? You can read what is written here. And he turned over one of the photographs. On the back was the inscription: “Wood carving, C tribe, Tokokul, East Anglia. Christmas, 1956".
At Christmas, Mr. Younoshi drove his camera through Tokokul, a village lost in no one knows where, no matter where, just a dozen adobe huts with monkeys in the yards and buzzards on the roofs. He decided not to stop, but suddenly he saw a negro who was squatting at the door and carving monkeys on a cane. Mr. Yunioshi became interested and asked me to show him something else. Then a woman's head was carried out of the house, and it seemed to him - so he told Joe Bell - that it was all a dream. But when he wanted to buy it, the Negro said: "No." Not a pound of salt and ten dollars, not two pounds of salt, a watch and twenty dollars, nothing could shake him. Mr. Yunioshi decided to at least find out the origin of this sculpture, which cost him all his salt and hours. The story was told to him in a mixture of African, gibberish and the language of the deaf and dumb. In general, it turned out that in the spring of this year, three white people emerged from the thickets on horseback. A young woman and two men. The men, trembling with chills, with feverish eyes, were forced to spend several weeks locked up in a separate hut, and the woman liked the carver, and she began to sleep on his mat.
I'm pretty sure that for most people, when they think of the book "Breakfast at Tiffany's", the image of Audrey Hepburn, who played the role of Holly Golightly in the film of the same name, and also graces the various covers of this work, automatically pops up in their memory. A short hairstyle gathered at the top, tinted glasses and a light smile in the corner of her mouth - this is how Holly looks at us from the covers and posters for the film. Whether you like it or not, it is this image that haunts you while reading, and even if you wanted to create your own image of Holly Golightly, I am sure that in most cases it would not be much different from what you have already seen.
I sometimes wonder what attracts books like "Breakfast and Tiffany"? Books without a special plot load, without active incidents and events built on fitful conversations, sometimes clichéd, similar to what we have seen before in Fitzgerald, perhaps Jerome Salinger. In my opinion, the answer is extremely simple - it's their charm. The novel "Breakfast and Tiffany", in fact, like the books of the above writers, is endowed with its own special and unique charm, their atmospheric absorbs the reader with his head; such books have an amazing ability to create a 3D reality, they make it possible to travel in time. Like a tourist wandering around different parts of the world, reading this book, I can say that I visited New York in the 50s and looked into Brazil of those times from the corner of my eye! Similar feelings arise when reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: it seems as if you are going to Spain next to his characters, watching a bullfight, fishing in a mountain river...
Frankly speaking, I did not create anything ingenious! He took a rather average plot component in its essence, seasoned it with quite typical cliché turns and decided not to load his work with deep moral and philosophical reflections. However, the brightest thing in his book is the image of the young girl Holly! Such books are definitely valued not by morality and plot, but by their images.
Who is Holly Golightly? An adventurer, a rake, a hypocrite, a frivolous person? Everyone will surely be able to characterize it in a special way, without repetition, and certainly one epithet is not enough here. I would call her a nostalgic woman! In our life, there are often people who appear at a certain stage, and then suddenly disappear without a trace, and the only thing left of them is memory. Of course, this person can send a bright postcard from Brazil and write a few words, but the feeling that this person has left your life forever never leaves. All that's left is nostalgia. This is exactly what Fred (the narrator in the book) is doing - he is nostalgic about his fleeting acquaintance with an unusual girl and that fleeting segment of life spent next to her.
Also, there is a feeling that Truman Capote has flavored his book with details from his own life. The image he created of 19-year-old Holly was not taken out of thin air; How many cuties has he seen in his life?! In addition, Truman's mother was married to a man who served 14 months in Sing Sing prison, just like the gangster Sally Tomato, whom Holly visited on weekly visits. There is no doubt that Capote, although he did not copy, was clearly inspired by the image of Marilyn Monroe, the basis of which he adopted for his novel. After all, it was her writer who saw in the image of Holly in the future film adaptation, and therefore was very disappointed to learn that another actress was approved for this role.
As I noted earlier, the story is told from the perspective of Fred, a young aspiring writer who is dating the attractive Holly. She shares an apartment with Fred in New York during World War II. He meets her for the first time under unusual circumstances, later parties are often held in her home, the guests of which are mainly middle-aged and various kinds of men. Such a way of life, of course, cannot but attract sideways glances.
As Fred becomes close friends with Holly, he discovers another side of Holly's personality. She is, on the one hand, an ordinary person, having dinner with directors from Hollywood, rich people and other prominent figures and, of course, dreaming of a profitable party for herself. In the whirlwind of such inconstancy, her only consolation is the establishment at Tiffany's, which for her looks like the real realization of all her aspirations. But on the other hand, she lives in a separate world in which the self-created "I" is so divorced from the dull reality that even Holly herself is hardly able to distinguish her own pose from casual behavior. She says that this could go on forever, but there are several moments in the book when she really exposes her soul and her true self, not fictional or pompous. The most striking example, perhaps, can be considered the case of a discarded cat (another manifestation of her posturing), but less than a minute later she jumped out of the car and, with tears, began to look for the cat that had already run away. Alas, she rarely became so sincere.
