Breakfast at Tiffany's
An ad for a jewellery store? A treatise on the deleterious effects of high-end prostitution on personal relationships? An acknowledgement that Sugar Mommies exist? All this and much more in this classic story.
Y’all know about our protagonist, some kind of high-end call girl, she’s in the poster. What shocked me right away is that our Prince Charming is also a member of the oldest profession in the world. Talk about an invisible minority.
She’s got an arrangement with a Mobster to go to Sing Sing collect the “weather report” for the “lawyer” (watch out for small boats on this and that, cloudy on Palermo, sunshine on Hong Kong). This pays well (even though she’s always broke), but she wants to go legit and marry some high-heeled fancy pants. Charming just wants to hangout with her, even when she’s not drunkenly teasing him about his clients.
Part of the trawling for high rollers are parties, which she gives in her home. The party is truly wild, I did not imagine such a tiny apartment could pack so many revellers, darling. Booze all around, they receive a new shipment of Kentucky’s finest mid-party. A woman talks to herself on the mirror, sometimes laughing her ass off, others mushing the makeup with long bitter tears.
A Brazilian guy called José Silva Pereira appears, a tall dark stranger, which is the most generic name possible. The equivalent of John Doe. Of course she snubs him over Rusty Trawler, the 9th richest American under 50, short, fat, and with a tinny voice.
Charming appears to be tailed by the client’s husband, so he moves around and finds out all about our girl: she’s actually named Lula Mae, hauling from Bumfuck, TX. Married at 14 to this kind fellow by the name of Doc, after running away from her home with her brother.
Doc wants her back, but she’s not into that any longer. He mostly came telling her about the brother, returning from the military soon, hoping to convince her to get back. No can’t do! It’s only a worse shock to find out her brother did die on a freak accident and she won’t ever see him again.
Everyone falls apart though. Rusty marries another broad, so it will have to be this José. She starts practising Portuguese (of Portugal, not the Brazilian variety), knitting and cooking. She even goes as far as summoning Varjak to a proper goodbye.
Except the cops get to her first. She’s busted by the Narcotics team as an accessory to the Sing Sing fella, the one of the “weather report”. José calls off the wedding, so she’s in the shit. Again.
Varjak tries to help her yet again, but she’s too independent for that. Always blazing a new trail, high and mighty, uppity. He lays into her and goes dumpster diving for the cat she abandoned. An “happy”(?) ending materialises out of the nowhere.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.