Breakfast At Debenham's

By William Brown

Beautiful young Indian girl, Bolly Golightly (Aishwarya Rai), is tired of her sugar daddy/tutor (Alan Bates) and forms an unlikely friendship with struggling writer Dr George Pepper (Hannibal Smith). Stuck for conversation, Pepper says: “What about breakfast at Debenham’s?” Golightly says she remembers the film of grease on it. Pepper recalls that indeed they both disliked it, and Bolly says: “Well, that’s one thing we’ve got."

Making an adaptation from Truly Kaput’s novel was always going to be a difficult task, for nothing definitely happens in Kaput’s narrative. The film is thus a philosophical meditation on the nature of reality, something one might expect from a collaboration between Wong Kar-Wai and Alain Robbe-Grillet, with Kevin Smith’s Mallrats thrown in for good measure. One could try to describe the film in terms of scenes, but this would be incorrect.

For the film is in fact one shot lasting 98 minutes – a bravura piece of camera work that sees spectators join characters on a tour of that archive of modern memorabilia, Debenham’s. Except the shop in question may not be Debenham’s (the film was, in fact, shot on location in Allders’, Swindon). The pair are in search of Café Venue, where the eponymous breakfast will be served, but find themselves returning to the Tupperware section, via bedding.

The dialogue, too, has a circular arc: “What are we doing?” “We’re waiting for Godard,” repeat the pair to each other, as if it were a mantra. In fact, so often do Bolly and Pepper repeat these phrases that they become devoid of all meaning. But this seems to be the film’s point: language is meaningless – all that matters is the primal search for breakfast.

However, the fast is never broken in a consumer world (Debenham’s) that is ironically filled with paraphernalia (Tupperware) that allows us to indulge our two most natural instincts (eating and sleeping) – and yet which is itself devoid of food and sleep. We are living in a simulacrum, the film suggests – a copy without an original. We have lost reality and the “one thing we’ve got” is the present moment – a sublime trap of profound meaninglessness.

For thought-provoking, sleepinducing cinema, see this film.

21st Apr 2005