On the Three Lenses of the Bitter Moon

Bitter Moon opens seven minutes with Nigel and Mimi talking in a bar. The basic tone of this scene is black, including Mimi's black skirt and Nigel's navy blue jacket, but at this time, the director of the back part of Mimi's exposed back has played a strong light, which is in line with the tone of the surrounding environment. The contrast appears very strong. Moreover, the lens adopts Nigel's subjective perspective, and in the eyes of the audience, it forms a picture of Mimi seducing Nigel physically, and the fact that the dialogue later explains is the same. Although the scene of the whole picture is close-up, giving people a very depressed and intuitive feeling, but the director placed a waiter in a white uniform behind the two actors to walk around, so that the picture would not be lifeless.


The 64th minute shot of the film is very interesting. In this shot, the director uses a mirror very cleverly to create a perspective effect of near, large and far small spaces, which makes people feel a very depressing and mysterious geometric beauty. In this shot, although the director used a close-up and very shallow shot, he used a mirror to create a semi-panoramic effect, and in this shot Oscar took up 80% of the whole picture Above, Mimi is only arranged in the lower left corner in the mirror, which also implies that the relationship between Oscar and Mimi at this time has actually come to an end because of the extreme expansion of Oscar's inner desire.


At the 114th minute of the film, there is also a scene worth pondering. At this time, the director used one-sided lighting, which caused Oscar to have a yin and yang face effect. Obviously, this is the expression of Oscar's contradictory state of mind at that time, that is, his feelings towards his past. Mimi regrets what she did, and hates what Mimi has done to him now. And the most interesting point of the whole picture is that Oscar is wearing a brown striped shirt, which is almost the same color as the CD rack behind him, and the CDs stacked together are very similar to the stripes of his clothes, which implies At this time, Oscar's status in his home was as lifeless or even non-existent as a CD rack, or in other words, even a plaything. But the most interesting part of this picture is that although its overall tone is brown, a door appears in the right quarter of the picture, and this door is pure white that has nothing to do with the picture, and the director also passed The light in the room highlights this pure white, the two tones form a strong contrast, and what is even more amazing is that when Mimi appears in the next frame, there is also a white door on her side, and this one The door was deliberately assimilated into a brown tone by the director, and we can think about why the director specifically expressed this tone in the Oscar picture? I think this actually means that there is still a glimmer of hope in Oscar's heart that the love between him and Mimi can be restored, but this hope is completely broken in the scene two minutes later. That is, there is an almost identical shot at 115 minutes of the movie, and in this shot, the white tones on the right side are completely covered by Mimi in black clothes. In this way, it can be explained from the screen why Oscar will recite in his heart: "But that night, I especially hit a low point."

View more about Bitter Moon reviews