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Cinescope ratio3/22/2023 ![]() The brief burst into wide-screen signals a departure into fantasy, but its sudden breadth also cruelly underscores the narrow conventionality of the mother’s aspirations. Dolan, predictably, cannot let this ratio play restthe boy can’t help itso, half an hour later, he once again expands the image for a dream montage in which the put-upon mom imagines her volatile son as normal and happy, graduating from school, marrying, settling down. Neither his bliss, accompanied on the sound track by Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” nor the pictorial amplitude it occasions lasts for long, the image soon shrinking back to its constrained frame. After almost eighty minutes of claustrophobic histrionics in Dolan’s chronicle of a working-class Montreal mom struggling to deal with her violent son, the troubled youngster urges the image’s narrow enclosure into the more conventional wide-screen 1.85:1 format with his hands, the opening intended to express his momentary sense of emotional release. The twentysomething Québécois director forever ups the aesthetic ante on the elders whose work he marauds≽olan compulsively reiterated Wong Kar-wai’s romantic use of slurred motion to redundant effect in Heartbeats (2010)so it is no surprise that the director’s “homage to the square” in Mommy, which is shot in a 1:1 ratio, proved more literal and strict than any previous use of the old-fashioned framing. Introducing the mammary-mad masterpiece, ’50s everyman Tom Ewell strolls onto a soundstage to inform us that Girl was “photographed in the grandeur of CinemaScope”the relatively new wide-screen process devised by Hollywood in its attempt to woo viewers away from their television setseven though the image Ewell occupies remains confined by the traditional squarish frame known as Academy ratio.* Tashlin wittily contrasts the old, uncool ratio, its boxy image connoting the preference of alpaca-wearing squares, with the rockabilly abundance offered by the ’Scope frame, by having an impatient Ewell nudge the image’s narrow borders until they unfurl to 2.35:1 fullness, the image extending to the promised, almost twice-as-wide, “grandeur.” As cheesy orchestral music swells on the sound track, Ewell coaxes the hitherto black-and-white picture into garish color, completing the pop-Brechtian maneuver.Īlmost six decades later, movie-brat bricoleur Xavier Dolan repeated Tashlin’s trick in Mommy (2014). Xavier Dolan, Mommy, 2014, 35 mm, color, sound, 139 minutes.įRANK TASHLIN’S The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) opens with a jape as brazen as the mock money shot in which a tightly attired Jayne Mansfield swivels past an awestruck milkman, prompting the phallic bottle he’s grasping to pop its top and gush its creamy contents all over his hand.
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