When a Man Loves a (Working) Girl

Why we still care for the all-time favourite love story Pretty Woman, which turns 25 this year.

I FORGET how, I forget when. Maybe it travelled to us as the song, over dour Doordarshan’s surprise Top of the Pops, or perhaps in the form of Julia Roberts’s long legs, or that image of her walking down Fifth Avenue holding aloft those shopping bags. Howsoever it did, Pretty Woman found its way even to a small town in Uttar Pradesh’s nowhere, where I lived in 1990.

To those of us struggling past one board exam and hurtling gingerly into another, with romance a tantalisingly distant dream, the film would find a cosy and immediate place. Those clothes, that necklace; his grin, her smile; his car, her fire escape — we lapped up everything.
It is 25 years since, and Disney just released another Cinderella. So let’s get that out of the way. Disney may have made Frozen, and earned bagfuls with its princesses and largely no prince story. Disney may have followed it up with a post-happily-ever-after Cinderella in Into the Woods. But, at the end of the day, everybody can live with a fairy tale.

But was Pretty Woman really that special, to have made Roberts a star for life and established Richard Gere as a romantic hero for the ages?
It wasn’t the “prince”. Gere’s Edward Lewis was as routine as they come, a much-older millionaire minting more millions while playing the piano soulfully and without seemingly doing anything more stressful than holding meetings where everyone hangs on to his every word (you saw him as recently as Fifty Shades of Grey).
It wasn’t the “story”. A down-in-the-dumps woman who gets a wardrobe makeover and finds her life transformed over a week (FSG, again).
It wasn’t the “godmother”. The hotel manager, played to raised-eyebrow perfection by Hector Elizondo, who steps in and helps out the woman with no expectations in return.

It wasn’t even the “friend” (Laura San Giacomo). A less-attractive, less-intelligent companion who is there apparently to just point the “princess” in the right direction (how many such friends do you know from films?).

But Pretty Woman stood apart in one aspect. Its “princess” wasn’t an un-besmirched vision of femininity. Even if Pretty Woman is too pretty to depict Vivian (Roberts) in the smut of her profession, our first close encounter with her involves her mid-riff and a small hook holding together the crop top and tiny skirt she is wearing. When they move into the car and into his bed, she is still firmly in control — of a lot many things.

Vivian is unapologetic about money, asking the price of stuff, and to a point, unapologetic about being a prostitute. Pretty Woman has a largely pink-hued view of the rich, seeing most of them as snobbish, exploitative, heartless and foolishly obsessed about which fork must go with which course, and Vivian gets to tell them off enough times to make us all feel very good about not being in that penthouse.

Gere, in fact, who leans more towards absolution than absolutes these days, himself castigates the film for its celebration of money. But that’s just our times of hand-wringing guilt. Pretty Woman may have been the last time an “obscene amount of money” was spent on something not meant to be sinister.

It’s lavished on Vivian, who shops guiltless. Snubbed unforgivably by one saleswoman, she is fawned upon by another when her budget becomes clear. Vivian’s delight, especially with that smile of Roberts and that Ray Orbison song, can melt many a cynical heart.

Edward may clothe her, show her off, treat her, and transport her to operatic delights, but Vivian never looks like she won’t make out of this encounter better off than before. She retains the clothes and takes the money, as her part of the deal, thank you very much.

It’s Edward who with his silly ties, sillier friends, most-silly job description (buying firms, breaking them up, and selling them for larger profits; without a day’s off to catch his breath) who seems more in need of help. Even if Gere does survive with his crinkly-eyed charm.

Remember Vivian is the one who withholds that kiss of love, for long, and decides when to bestow it. She doesn’t wait for him to say the words, and demands that he love her back.

That’s not to say Pretty Woman is much above its pay grade either. A prostitute, supposedly exposed to much worse than dental germs, who flosses? How more cute can you get? She doesn’t do drugs (the original plan had cocaine in it, but it was scripted out), doesn’t do pimps, and doesn’t have even one serious misadventure? How deluded is that? A millionaire whose father left him and his mother and who had his revenge by buying the senior out? How more cliched can it be? And a fire escape up and down which two crucial encounters of the film happen? How many more fairy tales could they reference?

Still, watch Pretty Woman again, 25 long years after you were a teen, and you don’t begrudge Vivian and Edward their happiness. Any story that survives such a test of time can celebrate itself.

Apparently, the film was almost called ‘$3,000′ before they hit upon Pretty Woman. Sure enough, Vivian’s last lines to Edward, when he asks her what happens after “the prince rescues the princess”, are “she rescues him right back”.

Daryl Hannah, among those offered the film, turned it down saying it was “degrading for the whole of womankind”. Roberts, a virtually unknown 21-year-old, got picked eventually.

As Vivian would have said, “Big mistake, big. Huge”. “The whole of woman-kind” can take a Cinderella, or two, or 25.

Source:: Indian Express