Saturday, March 13, 2010

What Nora Ephron Left Out

Of all the parallels Julie and Julia presents about cooking, marriage, careers, and heritage, it seems that the marriage element may have been the most interesting after all. In the film the bits of marital conflict feel like a way of creating "necessary drama" amidst all the light and fluffy, but in The Guardian today, Julie Powell herself admits that that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Powell tells of her infidelity while married to husband Eric, and more daringly reveals that she doesn't regret cheating on him. I'm not going to go into the politics of all this (I'm not married, so, yeah) but it does make you wonder about how different a movie Julie and Julia could have been. Could it have been more like Humpday, with Powell cooking a bit of Julia Child's breakfast in bed for her squeeze; or like Closer, with Powell's husband asking what the guy's cum tastes like while they nosh on Duck L'Orange?

It does confirm what I thought was a pretty depressingly narrow depiction of the woman as constantly staving over a hot stove. While it seems as if she's forever cramming to get the project finished it now appears she had time for a little extra-curricular Coq Au Vin. Who'd have thought?

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