Barefoot in the Park

I don’t watch television.  Or I don’t watch network television, because I would rather be curled up in a comfortable chair reading or watching a film.

Last Sunday afternoon after a long, cold winter walk I decided to find a movie that would be frivolous and entertaining, without subtitles, without violence, without the shock and awe that often finds its way into most Hollywood scripts these days.

The Criterion Channel is featuring the movies of Jane Fonda, so I selected Barefoot in the Park, a romantic comedy released in 1967.  The screenplay was written by Neil Simon and is based on the Broadway play that opened in 1962.  If you have watched the movie you know that the main characters, Corie and Paul Bratter, are played by Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.

Within just a few minutes I was laughing watching Corie as a newlywed, misbehaving at the Plaza Hotel, a grown-up Eloise.  Then we are taken to their first apartment in Greenwich Village, an unheated five-floor walk-up and full of “suspicious” people who are different, with cans of empty cat food in the hall and eyes that peer out from behind the door.

The laughing felt good. Tears of joy.  A relief after all we have been through over the last year. This isn’t a substantive film, but it is funny. Comedy as relief.

When it was over, I turned off the screen and thought about what I had just watched.   Lives that seemed so anachronistic, it was hard to remember there was a time when women were stay at home wives, often more adventurous and spirited then their conservative husbands who were the breadwinners. Men left in the morning, briefcase in hand and returned just after five o’clock expecting to have a drink before being served dinner.

That world has disappeared.  It couldn’t be sustained.  Shouldn’t be sustained.  And, yet, it doesn’t mean we can’t have fun and be frivolous, from time to time.

There is a moment of unity in the film, when the young couple after realizing they are different in temperament argue before reconciling.  I won’t outline the entire plot, if you decide you might want to watch it, perhaps for the second time.

We have at least six weeks before spring. The ground is frozen and when the temperature dips down into the teens we are forced to bundle up in layers of clothing.  Puffy coats, wool caps, warm scarves.

But soon enough the daffodils will begin to push through the ground and the sap will begin running.  Then we can think about running barefoot in the park or on the beach and hearing laughter mingled in with the sound of the soft summer breeze.