I just watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s. That last scene with the cat in the rain is great.
And there is a part of me that wants to say “life isn’t like that for most of us”, but another part wants to say, “and PARTICULARLY if that is true, that is the point.”
If no one is happy, is it not good to at least see it on film? And if people ARE happy, then it isn’t that unrealistic. The truth, of course, is mixed, and none of us are either fully in control of our destinies, or fully helpless. Love does happen. That is obvious enough. And love with enough work can certainly last a lifetime. I believe that.
And I think these sorts of things soften people up, make them more open. I have recently seen this concept of emotional agility occur in several places. Don’t movies, if you participate in them, take you through your emotional paces? Up, down, sideways, loops, upside down, slow, fast, hot, cold?
Now, watching three movies a day blunts this. I watch maybe 1 a week at most, probably more like 2-3 a month, and always something I’ve chosen. And they stick with me a while. I digest them. I’m like a cow with however many stomachs they have.
But contrast that with, say, Mouchette.
Is the world not more like Mouchette for many than most of us would like to realize? Yes, I think so. Life has been brutal and hard for most of humanity for most of history, and probably worse for little girls than little boys, although there has no doubt been plenty of misery for all.
And it’s worth recollecting, since it is easy to forget on this side of the Atlantic, that famine was common in Europe during and after both the First and Second World Wars. Audrey Hepburn endured starvation in Holland. It caused her a lot of health problems, and I will speculate may have contributed to her relatively early death from cancer. She also remembers seeing a boxcar full of Jews being loaded, and seeing a miserable little boy in pajamas about her age. Many French were directly affected by the fighting and the Nazi occupation. Au Revoir Les Enfants is in my understanding autobiographical for Louis Malle.
Spain was ruled by a dictator until the mid-1970’s.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall (while thinking about it, I will note that Kaliningrad, while larger, might usefully be compared to West Berlin, and at the moment to West Berlin after the blockade, in an interesting historical twist), most of us have forgotten “history”. It’s all golden now, we were told. We can’t fuck it up now, we were told. You can trust your leaders now, we were told.
No, until we are training our children to be mature, responsible, industrious, and informed citizens, the risk of a complete collapse into the Dark Ages–with a technocratic twist–remains between possible and likely.
So that’s my Mean Red. I think I’m going to try and remember that. My much nicer comment is that this sweet movie, which is what it was, was a tonic for me, today. That’s worth something.
And even within the movie they didn’t sugarcoat a lot of things. “Holly” came from an abusive family she had to run away from (as did one of my grandfathers, who also ran away at 14) and married a much older man out of desperation. Her manic antics had reasons behind them, which the writers and directors assumed people would get, just as they got that Peppard was in effect a gigolo.
Two cents, soon to be 1.75 cents.