A Delicious 'Breakfast'

The immortal image of Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" will return to the Brattle just in time to soothe those hearts aching with the recent loss of the star.

Scheduled before Hepburn's death, an eerie, slightly macabre coincidence marks the Valentine's Day screening of the 1961 classic. But the tender off-beat quality of the romance between Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) and Paul Varjak (George Peppard, perhaps better known to younger viewers as a member of the A-team) is a stimulus to budding and full-blooming romance alike. And the incredible luminosity of the shots of 1960s New York combined with the timeless, inimitable glamour of Hepburn herself make "Breakfast at Tiffany's" a wonderful antidote to the drizzle of Cambridge in February.

Holly Golightly and her nameless cat inhabit a barely furnished apartment in a Manhattan brownstone. Golightly peeks out from behind her door one morning to find that she has a new downstairs neighbor. Even wearing a wrinkled tuxedo shirt, a pastel blue sleeping mask pushed up on her forehead and purple-tassled earplugs in her ears, Hepburn conjures an almost unearthly elegance onscreen.

"And I thought in New York people never got to know their neighbors," Varjak laughs in surprise one evening as Golightly steps gingerly from the fire escape into his apartment.

"We are friends, aren't we?" Golightly asks Varjak after she lays her elegantly coiffed head on his shoulder and goes to sleep. This in-through-the-fire-escape intimacy is the beginning of their very unusual romance.

Both Golightly and Varjak have something to hide. Varjak calls himself a writer but has no ribbon in his typewriter and Golightly plays the part of a mod New York socialite though she is really a small-town girl who ran away at age 14.

Much of the fun of the movie lies in its depiction of a New York, that-if it ever existed at all-is long gone. The on-the-street glamour, the raucous high society party Golightly throws, the cleanness and safety of the city (Golightly indiscriminately buzzes strangers into the apartment building) and, of course, Hepburn's incredible wardrobe place the film in a never-never land of sweet fantasy much like Tiffany's itself.

But even the sumptuous elegance of Tiffany's is no match for Hepburn's long, lean and striking grace.

At one point she perches on her fire-escape, singing and strumming guitar to the famous theme song "Moon River." Her tender breathy voice delivers the melody as an ephemeral sweet, like a candied violet petal.

But Hepburn and the film artfully avoid the saccharine. Like the burnt peanuts which occasionally make their way into the Cracker Jacks Varjak eats, a bittersweet ache makes its way into "Breakfast at Tiffany's." This only adds to the confection.

During an uproarious party that Golightly throws, a man leans in to Varjak in overt chumminess. "Is she or isn't she?" he asks, confidentially, somewhat puzzling Varjak. As Golightly, eyebrows perfectly arched, cigarette holder pursed between her lips, flits among her guests like an exquisite hummingbird, there can be no doubt.

Clearly, she is.

And so the opportunity to wile away a few hours with Audrey Hepburn and your sweet-heart is not to be missed. If you don't have one, then go anyway and pretend Hepburn is your sweetheart (or that you are Hepburn--in which case you'll have sweethearts galore).