Friday, August 21, 2015

Audrey Hepburn and the Mirror of Authenticity

I just had the opportunity to see Roman Holiday on the big screen and wanted to share my thoughts on this romantic masterpiece.  Audrey Hepburn is perhaps more often respected for her elegant fashions than for her versatility as an actress, but this movie proves how good she could be.  She shows us a girlish princess on the brink of a mental breakdown, a drugged and half-asleep but still poetry-spouting would-be seductress, an innocent but somewhat mischievous young woman exploring Rome, and a broken-hearted royal bound by duty.  It’s a remarkable performance, and all the more so because Hepburn plays it with such apparent effortlessness.  The movie has a fabulous script, but Hepburn and Gregory Peck bring it to life with every word, glance, and gesture.

It’s easy to look at films with a certain alienation and cynicism.  We might be eager to immerse ourselves in a special-effects extravaganza or a fairy tale comedy, but we still know these things are not real life.  Roman Holiday doesn’t need special effects, and so human appearance and human relationships become special.  It is a kind of fairy tale, but ends with a heart-breaking reality.


Hepburn and Peck just feel so authentic.  The two of them aren’t posturing for their own mythology – they're sharing moments with one another, living and breathing and laughing together.  That’s partly a matter of chemistry between the co-stars, but also, I think, of Hepburn’s personality, of her ability to exist in a moment without artificiality.  One of her biographers, Barry Paris, quotes a Cosmopolitan article in which the reporter comments “When she reads, she reads; when she fits, she fits; when she talks clothes, she talks clothes; when she sits under a drier, she simply sits and dries.”  Her son, Sean Ferrer, recalled how Ms. Hepburn used to say “Boil it all down to what counts the most: What is the essence of what you are trying to do, what is the most important thing?”  Ferrer writes, “She lived her life believing in the power of simplicity.”

Was it her simple but focused immersion in the world that made it so difficult for her to cry on cue?  Peck recalled that Hepburn was “good at everything except shedding tears.”  Or was sadness something too deep, too personal to readily produce simply for the sake of a movie?  The director, William Wyler, had to shout out her – to make her cry as a person, not an actress – before he got the needed teardrops for a crucial scene.  Maybe that’s a sign of a limited or inexperienced actress.  But it’s that sincerity that shoots through the screen like an arrow into your heart, that makes you see in a fictional story an authentic image of your soul.

The film doesn’t end in a single climax, but in a series of heart-wrenching encounters.  The kiss after an escape through the river.  The solemn car ride as they are about to part.  Another desperate kiss.  Silence and separation.  Then comes the press briefing where the two would-be lovers can only stare at one another, so close and yet too far away.  Was bitter-sweet romance ever done with such confident reserve?  Watch Hepburn’s giddy, trembling smile at the recollection of joyful memories – then watch it fade away as she prepares to leave.  It’s a love story made for an actress who once declared “I think sex is overrated.”

Joe Bradley’s motives are selfish at the start, but gradually change.  So, too, do those of Princess Ann.  I’m not a big fan of the arbitrary aristocratic “duty” to which the princess sacrifices herself and her relationship with Joe, but the final scene makes an important statement about love.  Their love is real even when it is thwarted and unspoken.  It shapes them, defines them – it ennobles them in ways that birthright or wealth could never achieve.  Love is expressed in and through the self but reaches beyond it.  Joe Bradley goes to the press conference partly to reassure the princess that he won’t betray her secrets.  Gregory Peck is so awesome here.  He somehow conveys both his joy at seeing her – even now, even in these torturous circumstances – and his pain at losing her.  His final long walk through the ornate yet meaningless building is stunning cinema – and that brief moment when he turns to look back is just one of the small but vital touches that makes this such an astonishing film.

Oh, Roman Holiday.  You’re a film that proves the truth of what Charles Dickens wrote in Great Expectations: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears…”

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Audrey_Hepburn_and_Gregory_Peck_on_Vespa_in_Roman_Holiday_trailer.jpg

No comments:

Post a Comment