Cinderella in Reverse: 'Roman Holiday'

Perhaps it’s her eyes, or how her expression always bespeaks the shadow of a smile, even when she’s crying, but we warm to Princess Ann straightaway. Of course it helps that she’s young and Audrey Hepburn, but really it has to do with the way we meet her; in the midst of a lengthy and exhausting royal public relations tour of Europe. By the time she finally finishes shaking the hands of an endless entourage of aristocrats and (one presumes) eligible bachelors, she has us completely. Her humanity is subsequently cemented via her disarming mishap with a shoe.

And there’s something about that shoe. It’s Cinderella in reverse: Rather than putting the glass slipper on, Ann kicks it off (the rest of her royal trappings will soon follow) the first symbolic step in her semiotic transformation from princess to just a regular old girl. It’s not that the royal shoe doesn’t fit. It’s just that it’s terribly uncomfortable, especially after such a long day and so much standing, and really, given the option, she in all likelihood wouldn’t wear it at all.

The film is aware of the analogy; the princess herself references the fairy tale at least once. This to say that Roman Holiday isn’t afraid to be about what it’s about; what in the parlance of our times we call “on the nose,” an approach that these days is more likely to elicit an eye-roll than a teardrop, if only because such blatant sentimentality is so ill-suited to modern dramatic conventions and linguistic aesthetics. Roman Holiday remade tomorrow, aspiring to arrive at the same narrative destination as its progenitor, would have to come to it via a more more circuitous, subtextual route. But in 1953, the film’s unabashed earnestness — embodied in its characters, who if simplistic are only the more lovable for it — far from being a weakness, is its greatest strength. When Joe tells Ann, “Life isn’t always what one likes,” it’s the unfiltered, unveiled, inescapable truth of it that drives the stake through our hearts.

Roman Holiday isn’t perfect. There’s more than enough narrative wheel-spinning to go around, even if that wheel-spinning is uproarious. Some punching up, a little tightening of the narrative screws, a little conscientious aligning of the narrative stars would have gone a long way. Then again. A plot would be decidedly ill-suited to a movie whose lead character hates schedules, as would manufactured melodrama. (After all, we never really believe that Joe’s going to write that story, do we?) Spontaneity is the name of the game. Examined from this angle, a subtle brilliance begins to reveal itself. We know from the beginning that Ann will, sooner or later, whether she likes it or not, return to the embassy; the frame of the picture is enshrined in its premise, and puts to us a question, which serves as the engine of the story: how much living can one do in one day? There’s your tension. There’s your ticking clock. It’s not will they/won’t they. This is Ann’s movie. Like a toy mouse, the film winds her up, then lets her go wherever she wants, contrivance be damned, and Roman Holiday becomes to our eyes — like innocence, like youth — an ethereal adventure, too perfect to last.

By the end, Ann has grown up a bit. She has had her day in the sun. It is midnight. The carriage has again become a pumpkin. Time to go home. She returns to the throne with quiet grace, not having escaped the gilded cage, but better equipped to bear its burdens. The child in Ann dies so the princess can live. It is death by obligation. Put less dramatically, her yearning for freedom isn’t gone, but now she has a place to keep it: her memories, rendered in photographs, themselves contained in an envelope, to be procured when she needs them, but otherwise tucked away, hidden.

Joe, for his part, lingers in the grand hall — perhaps hoping that he is in one of those romantic movies where the girl comes running back, dress blowing in the wind, heralded by a triumphant brass-filled score — waiting for a happy ending that we know isn’t coming. He knows it too.