I am trying to get into Brian De Palma, and watched Sisters the other day, and now this movie. There’s a scene in this movie that made me want to write this post because it felt quite jarring to me. Maybe I am missing something or I’m in the minority who feel this way, so I wanted to discuss this here.

I’ve linked the scene in question. https://imgur.com/a/Sj9nTnK

So in the scene, we have a conversation between two people, shot by using camera pans between them. The way the camera slowly pans, we see more of the background than either actors in the shoot. The effect felt like L and J cuts taken to the extreme, where you see more of the background than the characters. To me, it felt quite wrong, and almost Tommy Wiseau-like. But maybe I’m missing something.

In this movie, there are almost no OTS or shot-reverse shot at all. Brian De Palma uses split diopter shots(I’m aware this is his signature style), camera-in-between-characters like some Roger Deakins shots I’ve seen, or just a two-shot in place of ots kind of shots. A lot of these shots, to me, work nicely. For example, there’s a split diopter shot of our main character in the foreground, lost in thought and looking sideways as he contemplates staying behind in Italy, while another character faces him and tries to get him to understand his thinking. The shot isolates the main character and visually shows him as being emotionally removed from the conversation. But there is also another split-diopter between the same two characters earlier in the movie, but this time they are just talking about going to Italy. The same context is not there. Here, the shot looks out of place. And to make things worse, the other character is placed further back and so the effect is accentuated for no apparent reason to me.

I’m just trying to understand what seems to me like pretty jarring creative choices for the sake of style. His smaller budget movie, Sisters which I recently watched, held up better than this movie to me and to me, and is a better watch in my opinion. So maybe the bigger budget and the involvement of Columbia and Paul Schrader and Hitchcock’s usual composer, all led to some compromises.

What are your thoughts?