Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

[This is my (very belated) August entry in Blind Spots.]

Don't Look Now begins with a fade out from rain cascading upon a puddle to shutter-shielded glass windows letting a few obscured rays of sunlight through the slats. These are soothing images, the first in a film filled with sights that would normally offer comfort and warmth. In Nicolas Roeg's hands, however, they become unsettling in a way that cannot be pinpointed or explained, an imperceptible dissonance that gradually creates discomfort. This mood carries through to the following scene, in which tranquil shots of a young girl, Christine, in a red coat playing by a pond are intercut with her brother riding on a bike nearby and her parents, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), working in the house.

Roeg sets up the scene with gliding camera movements and dives into and back out of cuts. It instantly establishes the movie as a gravity elevator, constantly sucked through the core, propelled back out and slowed by the pull until the camera begins to fall and start the process all over again. Reflective imagery inverts Christine, who is then warped further by a red-coated doppelganger seen in a slide John has of a Venetian cathedral he has been commissioned to restore. The vague intensity slowly building in these swooning movements and careful editing reaches its apex when the three separate but linked images run together: the boy runs over a pane of glass inexplicably on the ground and crashes his bike; the red-and-white ball Christine was playing with floating on the surface of the water as a stand in for the red-clad, white girl now dwelling under it; and John sensing something wrong when he spills some water on the image and the girl's Venetian "double" disappears in a thick streak of red. A suite of domestic horror, this opening scene captures the full feature in miniature and stands on its own as a complete action of mood, construction and tragic execution that would make for one of the greatest short films of all time if the movie stopped there.

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012)

The characters of The Hunger Games all have dirty fingernails. This is the primary insight to be intuited from director Gary Ross' incessant close-ups on the dirtied children culled from futuristic districts to fight each other to the death in a lasting reminder of the cost of rebellion. Sadly, fingernails are about the only thing I could make out in frenzied maelstrom of splintered images Ross assembles in sub-Bourne fashion. He's dealing with tricky material—the grisly killing of adolescents for sport—and forced to deliver a PG-13 rating to boot. He responds with a form of compromise: he gets to show teenagers dying horribly by making their demises so utterly incoherent that one cannot be sure anything's happened at all until the camera shows the tiniest splash of blood.

The shakycam mania of Ross' direction frustrated me more than usual because, to my surprise, I found myself engaged by the material. I haven't yet read Suzanne Collins' source novel, though I went straight to the nearest bookstore afterward to pick up a copy. Perhaps in her prose I'll find a more nuanced treatment of the themes, one that gives any kind of space to the material and lets the true horror of the titular games sink in rather than be roughly pushed along with all haste. And if nothing else, I'd like to get a fuller portrait of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the insipidly named but instantly memorable protagonist who seems to be locked into opposition with certain sexist trends in young female characters as much as she is 23 other teenagers.