Hi, my name is Tony
and this is "Every Frame a Painting",
where I analyze film form.
There's actually a lot of great videos on the internet
analyzing movie content or themes,
but I think we're missing stuff about the actual form -
you know, the pictures and the sound.
Anyways, the movie I want to talk about today
is a fantastic example of craft and art.
This is Bong Joon-ho's film "Mother", from 2009.
If you haven't seen it,
it's kind of a wrong man murder mystery,
and if you don't know Bong Joon-ho,
he's awesome.
Dude is seriously the best.
Be forewarned, there are major spoilers for the whole film.
If you don't want to be spoiled, stop watching this and go watch the movie.
Ready? Okay.
So there's two techniques, combined, that I want to bring up today.
The first is shooting important story moments in profile.
The second is doing that with a telephoto lens.
So normally, you shoot an actor, you want to see their face.
If you bring the camera around to the front,
it's generally a better way for us to empathize or to see their emotions.
If you play something off the profile of someone's face,
it's a little bit stranger.
It has a starkness to it.
Like this.
Versus this.
God. Stop. Oh god!
Now here's the weird part.
You throw on a telephoto lens,
and that compresses space.
We do it all the time in movies for close-ups.
It's more flattering
and it blows out the background, it gives this nice little bokeh.
But when you do it in profile,
it's not really a beauty shot.
It hides something.
Add a little camera operator shake,
and it's like we can barely keep up.
A lot of the major events in this film are shot
telephoto, in profile.
Actually if you watch the movie again,
you'll see that Bong very subtly
gives away the important plot points
versus the red herrings.
So when Mother meets the junkman,
who will turn out to be very important,
watch the lens.
Before that, when Mother goes to apologize
to the dead girl's family,
watch how this important moment plays.
There's actually a nice hidden cut in there.
Check that out.
If you're wondering whether this is a particular quirk of Bong's,
the answer is: kinda.
This is the big Act I turning point
in his monster movie "The Host".
Again: telephoto, profile.
But here, you can kinda understand why.
This is a point of view shot of another character,
and there's actually a nice visual rhyme.
Head on.
Profile.
And I don't wanna suggest that it's unusual to shoot things like this.
For example…
Man, that's awesome.
But it's still really weird to use it in "Mother".
I mean, who's watching?
Why's the director playing so many big moments
of his lead actress at right angles to the camera, in close-up?
Then you get to the climax.
Big spoilers ahead.
We find out that the son,
Do-joon, who we've spent the whole movie believing is probably innocent?
Well, he actually did commit the murder.
The only witness is the junkman.
His mother kills the guy.
And then she tries to clean up the blood.
Oh hey, look at this shot.
So that's why he shot those big moments telephoto, in profile.
It puts us slightly further away from the characters.
It reminds us that we don't know everything in the story;
that a lot is hidden from us,
or it's far away and it's hazy to see.
It turns us into witnesses who can't do anything about it.
But once we do see it,
we know what we saw.
In fact, that's kinda the great thing about this film.
You start the movie watching a character you've never seen before
dancing in a field.
You can see her face,
but you don't understand why she feels this way.
You just trust that the movie will explain it.
Then at the end, you see her dancing again.
Telephoto, in profile.
And you don't really understand her any better than you did at the beginning.
For two hours, the biggest bedrock of this movie
is that we know, for a fact, that she loves her son.
And at the end, we see all this has brought on her.
If you can't tell, I'm a big fan of this movie and of Bong Joon-ho.
I also really wish more mainstream directors
would be ballsy enough to shoot their big plot moments
like this.
Instead of like this.
Agh. God! I gotta get a drink.
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