Breakfast at Tiffany's, or Holly Golightly's heavy heart

[Movie Review, Breakfast at Tiffany's]*

The 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany's has, no doubt, one of the most beautiful musical scores in "Moon River", an opening song that intimates the delicacy of this movie. If the movie lives up to this score, then a high level of success has been achieved.

Holly Golightly is a confused, heavy-hearted girl, who hides her confusion and sadness behind a happy-go-lucky, frivolous mask, a mask that has to break if she is to become a genuine person. Her agent, OJ, calls her a phony, but a genuine phony, because she believes all the phoniness. She is living a life totally different from the one she knew as a child, while, deep inside, she is still that child.

Holly's childhood, which is at the crux of her problems, is not dealt with much in the movie, which is perhaps its chief weakness. We simply have to take Holly as she is without knowing much about her. Deep inside, Holly is afraid to love. She substitutes having fun for living. She simply doesn't take life seriously enough. And when she meets up with love, she runs away from it instead of running toward it. How to change directions is at the heart of the movie. Will she change directions? Will she stop running from love and start running toward it? Finding out is really the joy of this movie.

I felt genuine empathy for Holly Golightly. And the movie indeed lived up to the musical score. I could watch it again and again.


* This is a new venture for me: reviewing movies. A lot of writers do so on their blogs, and sometimes I just want to throw my two cents in. Ninja Alex has just run a blog hop in which people list their top ten movies. Pretty interesting to see the lists. Some movies pop up over and over again. Most of them I've never seen, so I've got some catching up to do. Happy movie watching.