Breakfast at Tiffany's is perhaps of the most enduring films of the 1960's. It owes that endurance one might think to the (somewhat whimsical) Weltschmerz it so acutely embodies, or to the cute love story at its center. However personally I was very fascinated by the way it treats space and I think this might be one of its most enduring qualities and the one that truly sets it apart.
Breakfast at Tiffany's takes place in a world of small apartments (echoing some kind of personality) and vast open spaces (seemingly more lifeless and mechanical); it's a story about imaginary cages and real ones. The film works its way around those concepts in fascinating ways: First of it is wonderfully photographed, the full scene is always lighted, the shadows are very soft, the contrasts clear but not dazzling; the whole scene is always visible, yet the 2 main characters are just about always the focal point of the scene, rendering the world around them redundant (in that sense it got a little from the ballet or musicals). This works both with concept of the outside/inside (apartment vs. public New York) and the concept of a cage, as the main characters are always wrapped in a bubble or perhaps a cage.
Which leads me to my next point: there is an inherent ambivalence about what a cage is in this film. On one side there's Holly's disdain for names and for belonging to someone (as she sees this as a cage), on the other side her hunt for property (money) and her eagerness to marry and to sell herself. There's the real cage Sally lives in, the conceptual cage of an apartment or a city and the psychological cage of oneself and yet on the other side there's an aimlessness to the main character's lives that resembles freedom. However they achieve nothing with their freedom (Holly earns no money, Paul doesn't get his novel finished) and thus it might also be a cage, while dedication to one thing might become freedom (or obsession as highlighted by Doc Golightly). Either way, the lines are clearly blurred.
The film further does something very interesting with the insides and outsides. It plays around with the superficiality of the characters, which is mirrored by the films structure that is centered around apartments and the public life in the city. The apartments would traditionally be seen as the inside, a shelter from the world and a place for quiet, intimate introspection, while the city (and in 1961 New York was the biggest city in the world) would be seen as the outside, a hectic and nameless world where everyone is a stranger. Still the film manages to turn that upside down. Usually the furnishing of an apartment would reflect its owner. It does so in Breakfast at Tiffany's but only in the sense that it is completely impersonal. Paul's apartment is decorated by his mistress, thus it is only her projection of him, while Holy decorated her apartment in an impersonal way in accordance with her values. Even the Chinese man's furnishing, recalls rather his cultural heritage than himself. Thus the characters become strangers to themselves and the world, they swim around anchorless in a modern, fragmented world, without any true representation of self. I think it's fair to say that this is a general point about society and not just applicable to the main characters.
Interestingly from here the film goes a path which few other films thread as it connects connotations of home to the outside world. For instance Holly cherishes Tiffany as the most homely place in the world (maybe again a product of her self-projection away from herself) and the salesman there is humanized when he is memorizing his past in a sudden moment of sentimentality, while beforehand he was only seen as someone with a function, a nameless salesman, who might as well be a machine. Further the film challenges our conventional ideas of space, when it fills an apartment to the edge of its capacity (for Holly's party which is a rather impersonal moment) and renders a big public space almost completely empty in the conversation between Paul and Doc (which is in turn a rather intimate moment despite the 2 people being complete strangers).
It is in such depictions where the film is at its most free-spirited, when it starts to show us a world beyond our own property (our apartments), that is just as much our home, a world where everything seems to be fleeting but our own dedication and ambition. It is a world where people pass through others apartments just as through a public space (I'm referencing of course to Paul and Tiffany) and where people become people again instead of a mere function.
Of course in this review I completely omitted the idea of personhood which this film also challenges by Holly's double identity and the double identity she imposes on Paul (Fred) and I also didn't focus on how Melancholy plays into the film (of course the rain at the end is very important here) and how the film subverts it twofold, by ridiculing and cherishing it. However IMDb's character limit allows for no more space than 1000 words, which ties in neatly as a finishing point to this little review about space (the film makes a somewhat similar point with Paul's short stories).
All in all it's a great film, worthy of its enduring reception and as I hope to have portrayed (be it in a limited format), there is more to the film than just enjoyable fluff which some reviewers were quick to put it off as.
Breakfast at Tiffany's takes place in a world of small apartments (echoing some kind of personality) and vast open spaces (seemingly more lifeless and mechanical); it's a story about imaginary cages and real ones. The film works its way around those concepts in fascinating ways: First of it is wonderfully photographed, the full scene is always lighted, the shadows are very soft, the contrasts clear but not dazzling; the whole scene is always visible, yet the 2 main characters are just about always the focal point of the scene, rendering the world around them redundant (in that sense it got a little from the ballet or musicals). This works both with concept of the outside/inside (apartment vs. public New York) and the concept of a cage, as the main characters are always wrapped in a bubble or perhaps a cage.
Which leads me to my next point: there is an inherent ambivalence about what a cage is in this film. On one side there's Holly's disdain for names and for belonging to someone (as she sees this as a cage), on the other side her hunt for property (money) and her eagerness to marry and to sell herself. There's the real cage Sally lives in, the conceptual cage of an apartment or a city and the psychological cage of oneself and yet on the other side there's an aimlessness to the main character's lives that resembles freedom. However they achieve nothing with their freedom (Holly earns no money, Paul doesn't get his novel finished) and thus it might also be a cage, while dedication to one thing might become freedom (or obsession as highlighted by Doc Golightly). Either way, the lines are clearly blurred.
The film further does something very interesting with the insides and outsides. It plays around with the superficiality of the characters, which is mirrored by the films structure that is centered around apartments and the public life in the city. The apartments would traditionally be seen as the inside, a shelter from the world and a place for quiet, intimate introspection, while the city (and in 1961 New York was the biggest city in the world) would be seen as the outside, a hectic and nameless world where everyone is a stranger. Still the film manages to turn that upside down. Usually the furnishing of an apartment would reflect its owner. It does so in Breakfast at Tiffany's but only in the sense that it is completely impersonal. Paul's apartment is decorated by his mistress, thus it is only her projection of him, while Holy decorated her apartment in an impersonal way in accordance with her values. Even the Chinese man's furnishing, recalls rather his cultural heritage than himself. Thus the characters become strangers to themselves and the world, they swim around anchorless in a modern, fragmented world, without any true representation of self. I think it's fair to say that this is a general point about society and not just applicable to the main characters.
Interestingly from here the film goes a path which few other films thread as it connects connotations of home to the outside world. For instance Holly cherishes Tiffany as the most homely place in the world (maybe again a product of her self-projection away from herself) and the salesman there is humanized when he is memorizing his past in a sudden moment of sentimentality, while beforehand he was only seen as someone with a function, a nameless salesman, who might as well be a machine. Further the film challenges our conventional ideas of space, when it fills an apartment to the edge of its capacity (for Holly's party which is a rather impersonal moment) and renders a big public space almost completely empty in the conversation between Paul and Doc (which is in turn a rather intimate moment despite the 2 people being complete strangers).
It is in such depictions where the film is at its most free-spirited, when it starts to show us a world beyond our own property (our apartments), that is just as much our home, a world where everything seems to be fleeting but our own dedication and ambition. It is a world where people pass through others apartments just as through a public space (I'm referencing of course to Paul and Tiffany) and where people become people again instead of a mere function.
Of course in this review I completely omitted the idea of personhood which this film also challenges by Holly's double identity and the double identity she imposes on Paul (Fred) and I also didn't focus on how Melancholy plays into the film (of course the rain at the end is very important here) and how the film subverts it twofold, by ridiculing and cherishing it. However IMDb's character limit allows for no more space than 1000 words, which ties in neatly as a finishing point to this little review about space (the film makes a somewhat similar point with Paul's short stories).
All in all it's a great film, worthy of its enduring reception and as I hope to have portrayed (be it in a limited format), there is more to the film than just enjoyable fluff which some reviewers were quick to put it off as.
