Last night I viewed the film Here On Earth. It’s a 2000 romance film, and after viewing the
first minute of the trailer before watching the actual movie, I had high hopes. It was pretty misleading. Or it was my fault for not watching the whole trailer. Either way, it’s a bad version of Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk To Remember. If you
know me, you know I love cliché, sappy romance films; however, this movie was
terribly acted and the storyline was just completely frustrating. A girl is
trapped between two boys; one troubled by lack of family and therefore is
spoiled with materialistic things, the other she’s known all her life. Guess
which one she falls for. Beyond that, she randomly has cancer and has kept it a
secret. Aspects of this film reminded me of the melodrama Written on the Wind that we recently watched in class.
Both films are sappy and emotional (characteristics of a
melodrama), as the audience is mainly women, according to past film critics who saw melodramas as bad filmmaking (as discussed in class). Though beyond that, the film has a
storyline that is quite male driven that is filled with drama and emotion. First
we have the tension between Kelley, the spoiled rich kid always looking for a
fight, and Jasper, the humble, loving boy that claims he and Sam (the pure,
good-willed girl next door) are destined to be together. This love triangle is
parallel to the love triangle in Written
on the Wind, between Kyle, Mitch and Lucy.
In Laura Mulvey’s 1977 paper “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” a response to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, she says, “Although this device
[mise-en-scène] uses aesthetics as well as narrative to establish signs for
characters on the screen as for the spectator in the cinema, elements such as
lighting or camera movement still act as a privileged discourse for the
spectator,” (Mulvey 41). Lighting is a large component in this film, because
if we are not outside where the boys are working to rebuild the diner they
destroyed or not doing their mandatory farm work, we are inside a dim house,
feeling Kelley’s dull, empty attitude.
In the shot below, we can see the disconnect between Kelley
and his father who is often distant (notice how he is on the laptop). Besides
the psychical distance created by all the objects between the two, which
reflects back to their minimal relationship, the darkness in this shot is
saddening. Kelley deeply longs for his father’s attention after his mother’s suicide;
however, he only gets it when he creates trouble for himself. Or rather for his
father’s name and reputation in society. The lighting in the office is
uncomfortable, a feeling that our character Kelley is feeling sitting in that
chair. Their bodies are almost lost with all the peaks of light above their
figure. An unsettling shot overall.
There are quite a bit of these shots, along with close up
shots to express the character’s emotions. Notice the close up on Jasper’s face
below. Sam just broke up with him and went on a bus to Boston to be with
Kelley. What is the point of focus in this shot? It’s his tear filled eye. The
whole background is out of focus but his left eye is the central point of
contact as that side of his face is established (due to lighting).
Mulvey is not wrong when she says lighting adds to the
narratives in melodramas, and while this is not a melodrama all together, it
contains the same characteristics.
Another powerful shot is this one below, where Kelley
carries Sam back after her knee gives out, signaling the cancer that Kelley nor
we are aware of has come back. At this point, I still was not pro Kelley. Sam
leaves the great guy (Jasper) for a rich, spoiled guy who is troubled due to
his family life. It doesn’t make sense to me, mainly because she falls for him
after hearing him recite a verse of one of her favorite poems. Suddenly he is
just misunderstood to everyone. Too cliché, even for me. Anyway, this is the
moment where the bad-boy becomes the soft, caring hero. He saves her. We are
focusing on their almost silhouette as they enter over the hill. The orange
skyline meets the out of focus ground, creating a very simple, yet narrative
turning, scene. He is the hero, and we now accept him. He saves her, he’s a good
person…?
This film is often times in Kelley’s point of view when
dealing with his family and his tense emotions, though like a melodrama
according to Mulvey, it’s much from a woman’s point of view, as again, women
are the central audience, for both a romance and a melodrama. Both are meant to
make you feel and make you cry. “The story-line is extremely simple, if not
minimal…and is told strictly from a woman’s point of view, both in the sense of
world view (the film is structured around female desires and frustrations) and
point of identification,” (Mulvey 42).
We get both Kelley and Sam’s desires and frustrations, as
they both want each other and long for something exciting and different in
life. For Kelley, it’s happiness outside of material things. For Sam, it’s a
change in relationship and a change from her small town, routine life. And we
can identify in one way or another to each character.
Then there are scenes that follow the words suggesting the
scenes. For instance, at the beginning of their relationship, Kelley says for
Sam to meet him that night. Cut right to them walking the baseball field at
night. We don’t need to see the time in between. Why show what we can infer,
right? Again, a lot of scenes are derived like such. This relates back to David
Bordwell’s article I mentioned in my first blog post “Understanding Film
Narrative: The Trailer”. While I plan to use the section of ‘Narrative as
inference-making’ for a future blog post, this sort of jump cut is a perfect
example of what he is talking about.
“By saying that narration pushes us to make inferences I’m
not suggesting that the inferences are models of deep thinking. They are, we
say, commonsensical,” he says, using The
Wolf of Wall Street as his mode of examples. I plan to go more in depth
with this in the future; however, in Here
On Earth when we don’t see the petty time passes in between, we make the
common sense inference that Sam agreed to meet Kelley that night, as we then
see them together a scene away.
Overall, Mulvey, while talking about melodramas in her
article, is quite right when she, along with Bordwell, says that camera
movements (and lighting) add to the narrative. While Here On Earth is not a
melodrama, it has components that connect with Sirk’s melodrama Written on the Wind.
While this is was not a very strong film plot and acting
wise, in my eyes, the camera work did a solid job to keep me from turning it
off.
Works Cited:
Mulvey, Laura. "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama." Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 39-44. Print. 
No comments:
Post a Comment