more waltz: why are parallels so satisfying?

That scene I blogged about last week from early in Take This Waltz? Totally referenced later in the same film. To the screen shots!

The top shot is the early nighttime scene, and the bottom is the later daytime scene that comes near the end of the movie. The compositions are a near match, and by starting the second scene this way, director Sarah Polley is practically telegraphing to us that we should be on the lookout for parallels (which are even easier to spot if you've already written a blog post about the earlier scene).

Another clear parallel, but with some difference. Now we're outside, on Seth Rogen's side of the window, hearing only his sounds again. This scene, just like its predecessor, is going to make the window an impenetrable barrier to sound, with all the kind of metaphorical stuff that could imply.

Again, also, the camera is switching focus to direct our attention between Michelle Williams and Rogen. That's a good enough parallel, but what I only realized in looking at this again is there's something else going on.

A quick explanatory primer: Between two characters that are interacting in a film, there is always a kind of axis. This line is actually really important from a filmmaker's perspective, because in a given scene, the camera will usually only stay on one side of that imaginary boundary.

The director, Sarah Polley, hasn't violated that rule because these are two different scenes and so the camera can be on opposite sides of the line, which it plainly is: Check out how the orientation is reversed between the two shots. It's just very neat that Polley's chosen to switch it up for the second scene, because it "violates" the rule without really violating it, and reproduces the earlier scene but only imperfectly.

Of course, it's possible Polley and her cinematographer just woke up the day they were going to shoot the second scene and couldn't remember how they had done it the first time. But I don't choose to believe that, because I like to think there are artists doing awesome things like this intentionally.

Now we get a little more parallelism going on, as another daytime shot imitates what we saw earlier at night:

Rogen's interacting with Williams through the window again, but now verbally, where in the earlier scene it was just through body movement. The sound isolation becomes even more poignant because we can see her crying, but when we're on his side of the window, we can't hear her.

One of the most satisfying things in movies are parallels, but it's even better when the echo of something is not an exact copy. Somehow, that's too obvious, too strong. It's better when it's a variation, and when it's this subtle, it's just sublime. At least for a dork like me.