Summer Binge: Why Roman Holiday is your bittersweet escape from the UAE heat, still magical after 70 years

I have to leave you now. I'm going to that corner there and turn. You must stay in the car and drive away. Promise not to watch me go beyond the corner. Just drive away and leave me as I leave you.

It has been over 70 years since Roman Holiday. Yet, few lines stay with you as closely as the words Audrey Hepburn tells Gregory Peck, before she returns to her regular life as a princess, leaving what could have been, in the dust. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t pinch or scar. Such explanations would deride the bitter and sweetness of the moment, after all, that’s what Roman Holiday is.

Atoms of sweet, in much bitter.

Re-watching Roman Holiday is a time machine to a different era of films. You might never have lived through it, but if you love those days of Hollywood, you’re taken in by the winsome charm of this world that you feel a part of, even though it’s long gone. You want to join Gregory Peck, a journalist named Joe, on his holiday with Audrey Hepburn’s Anne, a feisty princess. You watch their escapades; the dances on piers, fights with rowdy men and a lake-soaked episode. You watch their love story unfold through these moments, laughter, banter, silences, and dreams of a future that can’t happen.

What a time, it must have been to be alive, then. The charm of an old Hollywood, with a different, nuanced crisp dialogue writing, where a single expression left you with a sense of heaviness. And yet, ironically, despite a rather melancholy ending, you’re somehow left with hope. It isn’t maudlin. You aren’t crushed by heartbreak. In the end, Anne promises to ‘always cherish’ the memories of Rome, while Joe watches her from the crowds. Nothing overtly dramatic happens: But it’s that final, last walk of Joe, as he exits the room, that leaves you with conflicted, complicated emotions.

Could they have had a different ending? Of course. Would it have been just as loved, as this one? Who knows.

Somehow, it leaves you whole and hollow at once. Maybe that’s why there was no sequel. It didn’t need one.