Marian Seldes and the last of the grande dames

When I took a course on Fairy Tales in college, we spent a class session performing scenes from Ondine, by Jean Giraudoux. I secretly hoped to be cast as Ondine because Audrey Hepburn originated the role on Broadway, and I'd idolized Audrey since I was four years old. So at first, I was slightly disappointed to be cast as Bertha, the "other woman" in the play's love triangle. Then I saw that the role of Bertha was originated by Marian Seldes, and I decided that that was probably better, anyway. Wasn't it better to be a complex and passionate human woman instead of a naive, unworldly water nymph?

I never got to see Marian Seldes onstage, and this memory may not sound like much, but I remember it as a decisive moment in my personal development. Be striking, be "handsome," be impressive. Don't be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

With the passing of Seldes, Elaine Stritch, and Lauren Bacall this year -- grande dames who each, in their own way, exuded a larger-than-life theatrical personality -- it truly feels like the end of an era.

RIP, Ms. Seldes.

Seldes as Bertha in Ondine, 1950s.

Audrey in Paree

Apropos of some recent postings here at my blog, a clip from the movie Funny Face:

Fred Astaire plays "Dick Avery," a character based on Richard Avedon (prev. post), photographing Audrey Hepburn in various locations around Paris.

(and it's true that although I am skeptical of the whole Carey Mulligan = The New Audrey Hepburn comparison, I couldn't help but recall this Funny Face montage during the Paris scenes of An Education!)

Highly-Anticipated Movie Reviews: "An Education"

Yes! Now that it's prestige-movie season, my occasional blog series from last year returns!

Title of movie: An Education

Reasons for anticipation: I love female coming-of-age stories and wish there were more of them, so I believe in supporting these kinds of movies with my money. Furthermore, An Education got great reviews, especially for newcomer lead actress Carey Mulligan, and I really liked the trailer.

The moment that clinched it for me comes at the end, when Mulligan says, "I suppose you think I'm a ruined woman," and Emma Thompson retorts, "You're not a woman." I loved how Mulligan says her line with a sort of dreamy defiance--she seems almost to relish the idea of being a "ruined woman," because it sounds intriguing, like something out of a novel. And then I loved how Thompson's reply hits Mulligan's character exactly where it would hurt the most. Good writing and good acting--this looked promising!

Also, I've mentioned before that one of the novels closest to my heart is A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, and An Education seemed like it had a lot in common with that book. Both works are based around the following scenario: "Post-WWII, pre-Beatles England. A precocious and ambitious teenage girl yearns to go to university, meet sophisticated people, and leave her middle-class life behind. But she is also desperate to lose her virginity to an older man." So, because I doubt anyone will ever make a movie of The Virgin in the Garden, An Education seemed like the next best thing.

My verdict: I was not disappointed by An Education, and I definitely recommend it. Aside from the way that it gets predictable and perfunctory in its last ten minutes, it's a very good movie about the kind of female character that the cinema could use more of.

Yes, I probably am predisposed to like a film about a smart girl, the only child of respectable and caring parents, who desires more out of life--a teenage Francophile who loves Ravel and having conversations with "people who know lots about lots." This character, named Jenny (Mulligan), thinks she's found her ticket to excitement and cultural experience in David (Peter Sarsgaard), a good-looking wheeler-dealer who gives her a lift during a rainstorm one day. David proceeds to charm the starry-eyed girl and her more skeptical parents. Jenny is drawn into his world, even as her teachers caution her to slow down and David's mysterious lifestyle throws up its own red flags.

An Education is my favorite kind of comedy--one where the laughs arise out of character and situation, instead of being caused by gags or wisecracks or people acting quirky for no reason. Alfred Molina has the funniest role, as Jenny's father, a man so complacent in his bourgeois prejudices that he's wrong about nearly everything--he misreads both Jenny and David, to catastrophic effect. Rosamund Pike plays a character named Helen (the girlfriend of David's pal Danny), doing a twist on the dumb-blonde stereotype--not a sweet and breathy Marilyn Monroe type, but a real woman who just happens to be incredibly dim. Special mention goes to Emma Thompson for toning down her natural likability and playing an unsympathetic role.

The 1961 setting looks stylish when it needs to (sad that Mad Men is over for the year? go see An Education) but the scenes at Jenny's house and school show why our heroine finds Britain so drab. One particularly breathtaking shot has Carey Mulligan's tear-stained face briefly illuminated by the headlights of a car as it drives away.

Now, about all those reviews that are calling Mulligan the next Audrey Hepburn. As a longtime Hepburnologist (Audrey division), I feel uniquely qualified to comment on this. Basically, I think it's a bit facile, and runs the risk of putting Mulligan in a box where she doesn't quite fit. For one thing, I doubt Mulligan will ever be a contender for the title of Most Beautiful Woman in the World. She's pretty, and convincingly glows with enthusiasm, but she's not in Audrey's realm of otherworldly beauty.

But being the Most Beautiful Woman in the World is a great responsibility; it means that audiences expect you to be endlessly charming and adorable. Therefore Mulligan's everyday kind of prettiness allows her to play characters who are a little more complex, even unlikable, than Audrey Hepburn's tended to be. Jenny has a dry sense of humor, a ruthless pragmatic streak (she's thrilled by David's attentions, but on some level, she knows he's a means to an end), and an aspirational pretentiousness. We understand why she's pretentious, and can sympathize with her attempts to look sophisticated; but we can also understand why her friends say "You cow" when she brags in French about her boyfriend. And Jenny's love of French existentialism is not just a pose: its jaded attitude suits her personality. Upon losing her virginity, the prototypical Audrey Hepburn character would, I imagine, snuggle close to her lover, rest her head on his chest and murmur words of bliss. She would not, as Jenny does, go to the window, light a cigarette, and proclaim "All that poetry and all those songs about something that hardly lasts for a moment."

It occurred to me recently that in Audrey Hepburn movies, Audrey rarely interacts with other women... particularly not with women her own age. But one of the nicest things about An Education is that it surrounds Jenny with so many female characters--Helen, her mother, her teachers, her schoolfriends. I read a review that pointed out that each of these women is a potential role model for Jenny, and her decisions about which woman to emulate are just as important as her decision to have an affair with David. I would never have guessed that Nick Hornby had it in him to write so many female roles so well.

There are plenty of movies about young women who seek love and acceptance; plenty of movies about poor women who strive to escape poverty; plenty of movies where the female character just wants to have sex with a hot guy. An Education (and The Virgin in the Garden) does something different. More than love, or sexual pleasure, or money, or status and respectability, its heroine seeks to experience new things, to cultivate aesthetic and intellectual tastes, and to carve out her own identity. We're not necessarily used to stories about women who want these things--in the movies, it's usually men who crave knowledge and experience. But An Education shows how Jenny's ability to get what she wants is both facilitated and complicated by the fact that she is pretty and female. And therefore, she won't just learn what she wants to know--she'll also learn what she needs.

Remake "Breakfast at Tiffany's"!

What? I, an Audrey Hepburn fan since the age of four, am calling for one of her most iconic movies to be remade? Well, yes--but only if the new version strips away the romantic veneer and sticks to Capote's novella, which I just read for the first time.

It's a good thought-experiment, at any rate. And I'm not even talking about figuring out who would star in a new film version--I haven't gotten that far! (If you have any brilliant ideas, feel free to post them in the comments.) Rather, it's interesting just to ponder whether two Breakfast at Tiffany's films could coexist. I usually consider it sacrilegious to contemplate remaking a Hollywood classic--I'd throw a fit if anyone remade Casablanca or Bringing Up Baby or Vertigo. But at the same time, I am a lot more forgiving of remakes if the movie happens to be adapted from a work of literature. No one really minds that there are multiple versions of Little Women or Pride and Prejudice, do they?

And also, while the film of Breakfast at Tiffany's is immensely popular, it's not a perfect movie; a remake could improve on it, I think, much more than a remake of something like Casablanca could. The movie's most obvious flaw is its depiction of Mr. Yunioshi, the Japanese photographer--played by Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and an offensive accent. Reading the novella, I was pleased to discover that it does not treat Mr. Yunioshi as a buffoon or a stereotype. But the film also contains other, less obvious flaws that result from its hybrid nature. The screenwriter made it into a romantic comedy, but it's a lot more episodic than a typical rom-com, because it's adapted from a novella that is an episodic character-study. The scene where Holly's estranged husband, Doc Golightly, pays her a visit makes much less sense in the movie than it does in the novella.

Of course, it would be hard to eradicate memories of Audrey Hepburn. Some of the movie's dialogue was taken verbatim from the novella, so, when reading it, I couldn't help but hear Hepburn's vocal cadences. This, despite the fact that Capote thought Hepburn was miscast and wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the role! (More about this, and the contrast between the novella and the movie, in this excellent article from The Guardian.)

The novella takes place during World War II, not during the '60s--so, fortunately, the costume designer of this hypothetical remake wouldn't directly compete with Audrey Hepburn's classic Givenchy wardrobe. The '40s setting also means that Holly is a child of the Great Depression, which seems essential to explaining why she is the way she is. And there's one scene in the novella that I'm surprised wasn't included in the movie: Holly and the narrator go horseback riding in Central Park and the narrator’s horse gets spooked and runs away down Fifth Avenue. Wouldn't this be thrilling to see onscreen?

Most importantly, though, the novella was meant to be honest, even shocking; and after reading it, I feel sad that the wild and unscrupulous sides of Holly's character have been lost, dissolved in Hepburn's winsomeness (and the restrictions of the Production Code). The novella's Holly tells her cat to “fuck off” when she’s trying to abandon it; she bitchily implies that Mag Wildwood has the clap; she alludes to a history of childhood sexual abuse, made all the more poignant by the blasé Hollyish way in which she does it: “I toted up the other night, and I’ve only had eleven lovers—not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn’t count.” It's impossible to imagine Audrey Hepburn saying any of those things, but they are essential parts of Holly's character.

I guess Capote was unhappy with the Breakfast at Tiffany's film, but a passage of the novella seems to foreshadow what happened to his story once Hollywood adapted it. Holly Golightly reads one of the narrator's short stories and complains that it has too much description and "doesn't mean anything." The narrator, infuriated, asks Holly for an example of a story that she thinks does mean something.

"Wuthering Heights," says Holly. "My wild sweet Cathy. God, I cried buckets. I saw it ten times."

"Oh, the movie," the narrator says condescendingly.

Holly loves the film version of Wuthering Heights because it is thrillingly romantic, but if you've read Emily Brontë's novel, you know that it is a dark, sordid, disturbing book. And, just as it annoys me when people sigh over Heathcliff and say that Wuthering Heights is a vision of ideal love, it now annoys me that people think that the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany's is the one that really "means something."

Dov'è Gregory Peck?

A year ago today, I was visiting Rome for the first time. It was spring break in France, and I chose to take a bus tour of Italy with a group of French people (I assumed most of them would be students; they weren't). Rome was our last stop, after Pisa, Florence and Siena.

Now, thanks to a lifelong love of Audrey Hepburn and a pirated videocassette from my grandfather, I've seen Roman Holiday so often I've practically memorized it. Some of its lines have even become catchphrases in my house: we say "You have my permission to withdraw" when we want to make someone go away, just as Princess Ann (Audrey) does in the movie. The bus tour gave us only two days in Rome, but look how much fun Audrey had in half that time! So I was determined to hit the same tourist spots that she did (and you can imagine my disappointment when we got to the Mouth of Truth fifteen minutes after it closed).

I always seem to get a sunburn on the first sunny days of the year, and I got a pretty bad one in Rome, from hanging out too long by the Trevi Fountain and on the Spanish Steps. But I simply had to go to the Spanish Steps and eat a gelato, like Audrey in the movie! Since Gregory Peck was nowhere to be found (nor Eddie Albert with that funny camera concealed in his cigarette-lighter), I had to attempt to take a picture of myself and my rapidly melting gelato:


After I finished the gelato, I sat on the Steps and found a discarded copy of Le Monde. It was a special issue devoted to the French presidential elections (which were happening in a few days) so I read it with interest. Then a young man approached me. He was decidedly not a handsome, well-tailored Gregory Peck type. He was a weedy-looking little punk in a baggy T-shirt; the kind who trolls the tourist districts looking for young foreign women.

He saw my Le Monde and asked "Francese?"

I took a deep breath. I did not feel like launching into a complicated explanation about being an American studying in France. The last thing I wanted was more attention from this guy. I assumed that the word "American" is catnip to these men's ears, whereas if I were actually French, he might leave a fellow European alone. I'd been in France for over three months by this point, and knew enough about the country to make up a convincing lie about living there, if need be. I'd been developing a good French accent and conversation skills, and assumed that I knew more of the French language than he did. So, even if it were a lie, pretending to be French might be the simplest solution...

"Oui," I said.

And he left me alone! My plan had worked!

On the long bus ride back to France, I ended up watching Roman Holiday yet again--or, I should say, Vacances romaines, because they showed the French-dubbed version. While I missed hearing some of Audrey's line readings (she won the Oscar for it after all), I didn't find it incongruous that her character spoke French. Audrey practically seems French anyway--so petite and refined, and half of her movies take place in Paris.

But when it comes to Gregory Peck, that's another story. His character, Joe Bradley, is supposed to be the quintessential American newspaperman, so it doesn't work if he speaks French and calls himself "Zhoh Broad-lay." Also, in the script, Joe is slightly disreputable: having gambled away his money, he plans to sell Princess Ann's story to the newspapers. But because Gregory Peck, that icon of decency and moral fiber, plays Joe, he remains likable throughout. Speaking French, however, Joe becomes downright sleazy. When Ann wakes up in Joe's bed, wearing his pajamas, the French-language dubber puts a salacious spin on "Zhoh"'s lines. This one little change causes the movie to lose a great deal of charm.

Yes, Gregory Peck was one-of-a-kind, and though I hoped to run into a modern version of him on the Spanish Steps, that seems unlikely, these days.