Let’s start with the film adaptation.

I had been wanting to watch the film for various reasons:

1. It probably is Audrey Hepburn’s most iconic role. I had been enchanted by her since I watched Roman Holiday.
2. Screenshots, posters and artworks of the film had always been very appealing to me, e.g the little black dress+pearls outfit or the singing-on-the-window-pane scene.
3. Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf — her constant dreams in various roles of Audrey Hepburn (Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is obviously her favourite). There’s even a cat named Cat, like in the film.
4. The film is from the 1960's.

At that time I didn’t know that it was a book adaptation, and I also didn’t know anything about Truman Capote. I didn’t even know what the film was truly about.

The opening scene was lovely, and just what I had been expecting (the picture above). The rest of the movie didn’t include the black dress outfit and there was no actual “breakfast at Tiffany’s” anymore, which disappointed me.

Miss Golightly’s other outfits were beautiful nonetheless, and needless to say, Audrey Hepburn was enchanting throughout the film. The singing-on-the-window-pane scene was one of the few memorizable scenes, along with the short scene when Miss Golightly has a nervous breakdown and is lying on her bed after she found out that her brother, Fred, had died.

It was one of the films when you feel like the whole film had been filmed on 2 or 3 sets — most of the actions seem to take place in Miss Golightly’s apartment. It has a bit of an ‘unreal’ feeling to it (which, I think, is very common in ‘old’ American movies).

The film wasn’t quite what I had expected it to be.

I didn’t think much further about it back then until I held a copy of the book in my hands.

The novella was an easy and fun read. I enjoyed it very much — the style, the flow, the word choice, the atmosphere. I had to admire the skill of Truman Capote.

The book gave me a better insight into the characters (books > films, FTW). Many of the scenes in the film don’t actually ‘happen’ in the book. The endings are completely different. The film is lighthearted and doesn’t provoke thought in the viewer, whereas after finishing the book I immediately went on to read reviews to satisfy my need to understand the characters.

For example, after watching the film I would have never thought of the possibility of the narrator “Fred” (named Paul Varjak in the film) being a homosexual. There’s no trace of Miss Golightly’s fondness for marijuana, excessive cursing or abortion in the film. The “breakfast” is only mentioned in the book — we don’t experience it.

Also I read that Truman Capote initially wanted Marylin Monroe as Holly Golightly.

The Holiday Golightly from the book is a gold digger, someone who wants to ‘make it’ in the high society of New York. She is obsessed with rich men. Maybe the Holly in the film seems less ‘immoral’ because we can’t really think of Audrey Hepburn in that way, can we?

All in one, Holiday Golightly might not be a very good role model. People who post pictures of her on social media and have poster of her hanging on their walls should be aware of it and look beyond the pretty outfits, because sometimes we forget the essence of things.