Word: closeup
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...closeup view of Seaboard, let's begin with Albert Lea. For most of this century, Wilson Foods operated that pork plant and was the town's largest employer. Wilson fell on hard times in the early 1980s, cut workers' average annual pay from $22,200 to $16,600 and eventually sold the plant to Farmstead Foods. In turn, that company went belly-up a few years later, after it lost its biggest customer--Wilson. Then, in December 1990, just as workers were receiving the last of their unemployment checks, Seaboard appeared...
Kieslowski and his gifted screenwriting colleague, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, knew that drama begins with the human face; it is a sponge for the viewer's emotional complicity. So the camera takes closeup mug shots of faces in love or anxiety. Or it crouches furtively, behind a tree, in a closet like a fretful nephew or an avid voyeur. It watches ordinary people (including some of the most beautiful actresses in Europe) tangling with moral demons, holding on to what they were taught to believe or--this being real life in Poland just after martial law--what they have learned to settle...
...skin. The body is hunched; it needs a cane for support. Getting a first glimpse of Marcello Mastroianni here, the viewer is not surprised that this was the last film he completed before his death in late 1996. Was he only 72? He looks a decade older, frailer. A closeup could be like an autopsy, were it not for the actor's perennial ease and grace before the camera...
...that weren't charming enough, at the end of the interview, Simpson told Wax he had a surprise for her. When the teensy interviewer opened a door, Simpson lunged out from behind it, made a few stabbing motions with a banana, then leered in extreme closeup into the camera. Somewhere, some publicist's cell-phone is ringing...
Then comes a closeup of a mosquito landing on our protagonist. He lets it bite him, and as it flies off, the mosquito explodes...