Word: foregrounded
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...bring both elements into focus at once are the film's high points--for instance, a panning shot of the passengers waiting for their truck at a gas station starts out as a simple portrait, but is interrupted as a Texaco gas pump passes before us in the foreground. Too bad these moments are structurally isolated, a few good ideas jumbled together in a rather muddled effort...
...style and the meaning of the whole sequence of events to this point show a great development for Ophuls. The settings (in particular the use of foreground objects) and the relatively static camera and quick cutting emphasize the fixity of Lola in her settings. Ophuls does not develop a romantic personality in the abstract; he derives the meaning of her life from her changing position and motion in a setting. The inescapability of Lola's physical settings, her existence in the physical world, is the reason her ambitions are defeated--but it's also the basis of her fleeting triumph...
...overlap one another; all are fully visible; yet he saves his shots from being flat tableaux by placing his actors at different distances from the camera and by enhancing their different depths with lighting. The way he places his "realistic" objects similarly use depth. Prominent natural objects in the foreground play off objects in the background to make the space of each shot real and three-dimensional...
...seduction scene, for example, the foreground figures are backed up by cows and by trees and mountains in the far distance. For a hiking scene in the mist--the most illusory of conditions--rock outcrops in right foreground key the shot by giving us an immediate material object. Contrasting with the figures in medium distance against the far rock-ledge, all the objects together establish real space between them. For Stroheim there is no such thing as a general form or formal similarity between different objects. Each object it its material self, nor is there one kind of object...
Unfortunately, once he has provided the detailed backdrop, Ivory and his co-scenarist, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, neglect most of the objects in the foreground. A face outlined here, a figure there, and they consider the task completed. It is not. The guru and the singer may be alive; the rest are actors sitting for sketches with only the vaguest dimension or purpose. Moreover, lines like "I feel so trapped. No one here understands me" tend to mock the film's painfully straight face...