Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Breakfast at Tiffany's
1961 · Blake Edwards · Breakfast at Tiffany's on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the empty street in the film's first shot. (light)
Planer shoots Fifth Avenue at dawn in even gray light with no traffic in it. A cab pulls away and Hepburn stands alone at a shuttered window with coffee and a pastry. Nothing happens for a long beat.
Payoff: The film opens on wanting, held still. She is looking at what she cannot have through glass that will not open. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). The reading calls this a qualisign: a space emptied of action that radiates one quality, here longing with nothing to do.
Look at how little furniture is in Holly's apartment. (setting)
Boxes sit unopened. A bathtub serves as a sofa. Nothing is finished, hung or put away. Holly lives in the rooms as if a bus leaves within the hour.
Payoff: The apartment makes her refusal to settle visible long before she says a word about it.
Watch how Hepburn holds the cigarette holder and her chin. (performance)
The black sleeveless Givenchy sheath, the pearls, the holder kept at arm's length, the cool diction. Hepburn builds Holly out of poise and clothes and never lets the construction wobble in company.
Payoff: The costume says what the 1961 script is forbidden to say plainly. This is a woman kept by men. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading calls Holly a forger: she is not lying about who she is, she is composing it, and the composition is the person.
Listen to Hepburn's voice when she sings on the fire escape. (sound)
She sings Moon River in jeans and a towel to her own guitar, in a small untrained voice. Mancini's melody returns elsewhere in full orchestra. This one has nobody arranging it for her.
Payoff: The single time the act drops, the film hands her a song about a place she invented and cannot reach. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a person telling herself into being out loud, with nothing managing the image for once.
Count how many things go wrong during the cocktail party. (cutting)
Howard Smith cuts the party for escalating density. A woman weeps at the mirror. Incidents overlap instead of taking turns, and the apartment fills far past what it can hold.
Payoff: The crowding is both the joke and the diagnosis. Holly packs her unfinished rooms with people she barely knows.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Holly keeping herself invented. The film loves her most in the moments the disguise almost slips and never quite does.