It starts with an
extreme close-up of two faces, enrapt and making out. The camera slowly pulls
back to reveal that it’s two men, standing by the open window of a car, its
radio the source of the music we’ve been hearing the whole time (Greg Brown’s “Banjo
Moon”).
As I watched the
beginning of this opening shot, I expected to see that the two characters were
actually on a screen themselves, being watched on a cinema screen by a third
figure—yet this did not occur. I’m wondering now why this was my expectation:
Was it merely the slow, deliberate backwards movement of the camera (which in
other movies results in a similar kind of disorienting mise-en-abyme)? Or was
there something in the performance of the characters themselves, something put
on, obviously artificial?
The same sort of
camera movement concludes the film, moving back from the image of a fully
clothed woman fucking (or appearing to fuck) a naked man from behind. But this
time the backwards motion reveals a third character, watching the two
characters in the strange throes of something like passion.
The two shots
together affirm the sense of anticipation I felt while watching the first but
at the same time disrupt this same anticipation. For what I understood as empty—the
lips of living men—is revealed instead to be the source of fullness and the
cause of fascination. That is, the emptiness exists on the other side of the
image: me, dead, watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment