Last night I finally rented ‘Summertime’, the 1955 Katherine Hepburn film about a middle-aged woman who travels to Venice. I say ‘finally’ because when I was not long here my friend sent me a screenshot from the film as a postcard from Italy (and on seeing the image of Hepburn in a shop with a smiling-black-slaveboy decoration in the background, I knew it had to be Venice, as they love their smiling-black-slaveboy motifs to this day!) I was planning on renting it at some point, but I put it off because I thought it might be slow or dull, and for some reason I thought it co-starred Rock Hudson and not the charming Italian actor it actually does. Last night, though, thoroughly exhausted from two opening shifts in a row (the earlier one in which I had been accused of not giving a teenage girl the right amount of change and a posh middle-aged woman guilted me because the store was out of plastic knives) I thought it was time to curl up with my old friend Katherine.
The movie is lovely, and shot gorgeously on location. The picturesque but cramped architecture of Venice is used brilliantly as characters will rush out of scenes only to be glimpsed in the background, crossing a little bridge or running up a flight of stone steps. Having been there last year, I got very excited that the first scene took place on the same train route that we took (all the sudden, outside of the windows, all you can see is water and then you know you’re close to Venice) and I recognized other locations relatively unchanged in fifty years.
The plot concerns Hepburn, whose name in the film is Jane Hudson (but not ‘Baby’ Jane Hudson) who saved up her whole life to visit Europe alone as she’s Katherine Hepburn and a self-described ‘independent’. Of course, ultimately, she falls in love, because that’s what happens to Americans in Europe, but the best parts of the film for me where in the first half, when she wanders around by herself, trying to make conversation with other tourists she has nothing in common with, unsuccessfully attempting to wrangle invitations out for dinner, and her only friend is a little Venetian boy who follows her around trying to sell her pens and pornographic postcards as souvenirs. The film captures the conflicting feeling of being overwhelmed by beauty while being doubly lonely with no one to share it with. At one point, suppressing tears at a cafe, a woman asks her if something happened to her and she replies, “No, nothing happened. That’s the story of my life, really.” I could definitely relate.
Two nights ago, I wanted to get out of my apartment, as I was getting utterly sick of the British TV adverts I see over and over again, and we’re sharing our space with a psychologist now, who will exit her office only to light candles in our hallway to mask the smell of our cooking even at dinner time, but nothing was on at the Irish Film Institute. I looked for other possibilities and found out ‘500 Days of Summer’ was on at the Savoy, a big ugly movie theatre located on the North Side’s big ugly O’Connell street. I suddenly had the urge to not see the film alone, so I text messaged my new Brazilian co-worker slash protégé Eduardo. How much more at home does it make one feel when you have friends who are ready to go out at the spur of the moment? He was in, but wanted another film as he had seen that one, so I did more research and saw that ‘Julia and Julie’ was on at a theatre that appeared to be right in city centre, but I had never been too, and so it was decided.
‘Julia and Julie’ tells the (two) true life stories of PBS celebrity chef Julia Child and modern day would-be writer Julie Powell who starts a blog in order to document her attempting every recipe in Child’s beloved cookbook ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’. Switching back and forth through the decades, the film shows the difficulty Child went through as a wife of a diplomat living in Paris after WWII trying to find what she should do with her life (“The wives here don’t DOOOO anything!” Meryl Streep groans in Child’s bizarrely swoopy voice) and the resistance she encounters when she commits herself to becoming a French chef, intercut with Powell’s (Amy Adams) blog-writing, which is an escape from her depressing cubicle job dealing with post-9/11 insurance claims (although it’s interesting to see September 11th now being shown as a matter of life in New York in romantic comedies). As a failed novelist, Powell also has to figure out what to do with her life, until her blog and the spirit of Julia ‘save’ her. There’s a hilarious scene early on when Powell goes out to meet her upwardly-mobile friends for lunch at a trendy Manhattan restaurant and they all order ‘cob salads without...’ (‘cob salad without egg’, ‘cob salad without bacon...’, etc.) The joke is that if, as Powell at one point claims, Julia Child taught America to eat and appreciate great food, we seem to have forgotten again.
Afterwards, hungry (of course!) and not wanting to go home yet, Eduardo and I went to a trendy tapas place on George Street, shared a plate of what was essentially potatoes and meatballs, but the red wine was good, and talked about the big cities of Brazil, families’ religious backgrounds, and life after death.
‘Julia and Julie’ was good escapism, and also made me miss my Mom, who gets great pleasure from cooking and also gets great pleasure from Nora Ephron (mostly ‘When Harry Met Sally...’ and really, who doesn’t?) but it also inspired me to figure out what I’m doing with my life (or at least continue to think about it). I’m twenty-four years old, have a Masters degree in everything but name because of a French test (Julia Child failed her first French cuisine exam, which made me smile), have never had a job in a field I’m really committed to, am interested in all sorts of things (film, fashion, art, politics) but the only thing I ever do which I’m good at is write, and, like Powell in the film, I can only do that with a blog. And you wonder if even that is really getting out there. Powell writes a couple times on hers, “Who is reading this anyway?” and another time gets all excited for her first comment, which turns out to be from her Mom.
All that being said, I still have time. Julie Powell was thirty when she got famous for her blog; Julia Child in her forties when she discovered French cuisine; and Jane Hudson was middle-aged before she finally went to Venice and fell in love. I also have a supportive family, the ability to make friends quickly and North American optimistic energy, which is mostly being used to ask “For here or take-away... and what size...?” over and over and over again. But by moving to Dublin all alone I proved to myself that I could do the brave and at times difficult thing in order to have an adventure and change my life. I will be ready to come home when I do, and take some Ryerson courses which will hopefully point me in new directions, reconnect with old friends and make new ones, and, perhaps most importantly, continue to write.
I know that should be the ending, but the theme of this post got me thinking about films about Americans in Europe and how many great ones there are: ‘An American in Paris’; ‘Before Sunrise’; about five Audrey Hepburn movies, with the most popular being ‘Roman Holiday’ (okay, she’s not American technically, but the movies usually have someone like Gregory Peck also in them. Everyone should check out ‘Two for the Road’ with Audrey and Albert Finney, which tells the story of a married couple meeting, falling in love, getting older and more distant from each other through non-linear scenes from their road trips around Europe in the 1960s).
Of course, these movies usually show Paris or Rome or Vienna not as they ‘really’ are, but as the manifestation of magical old world Europe, the flipside of industrial America. This is why almost all of these movies end with the American leaving; they have to, like Dorothy clicking her heels in order to return to Kansas, because the European city was just a whimsical escape from the real world, which is, naturally, America. But that’s okay. ‘The Journey’ as an archetype is very ancient, most likely the very first story, and we need it as much as early humans did to encourage us to venture into the unknown.
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