Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/569837
52 dga quarterly a chair. Cholodenko likens the vibe to an "asylum." She adds, "I love these images, where you see him in context, what the world is without going to his face and cutting to a point of view. It's nice shorthand. So here are the 'civilized' people, the cultured people. But who's more bizarre? Rayette and that crew or these people?" Over a few eating scenes around the dining room table composed mostly of tight close-ups and gentle interrogation, we grasp that Bobby's connection to his family is an obvi- ous source of unease. In one meal scene, a quick edit between Bobby and Catherine, who seems normal, hints at his attraction to her. "Here's a new sex interest," notes Cholodenko. "It's such a peeling of the onion. These [pictures] really demand that you be in an uncom- fortable space. There's no breathing room." When Catherine asks Bobby to play something, Rafelson initiates a slow pan from Bobby's fingers at the keyboard across Catherine's face, a resting violin, and several family portraits, before returning to Catherine. It's one of the few self-consciously "directed" shots, and Cholodenko finds it off-putting. "It's kind of clunky, really. He's try- ing to weave the whole world together, who the family is, what he broke away from, and that's a hard thing to do. There's an artifice to it. It doesn't feel in keeping with the style of the film, which is more organic and free. But I appreciate it, because it's also the kind of film where you can tell they're trying stuff." She's more taken by how Rafel- son ends the shot, settling on Catherine in close-up looking deeply affected—she loved it—then cutting to Bobby in a medium shot look- ing blasé, because he was faking it. "It's simple shorthand: She's vul- nerable and expressive, he's just detached—but it's effective." Soon Bobby confronts Catherine about her signals, and they have sex. But when he introduces Rayette to the house, his embarrassment probably avant-garde then." Cholodenko points out the way Rafelson eases into the tense com- edy of picking up a passenger who turns out to be a kook. "That's a great frame," she says of the first post-pickup shot, a long, through- the-windshield take, symmetrically placing Bobby and Rayette on the sides of the frame in the front seat, and the back-seat hitchhik- ers spatially in between them. "It's the tension of not cutting away. They're just there. You're the camera. You're trapped. There's this natural light, and these complicated, crazy characters, and you don't really know where the fuck it's going. Then [Rafelson] cuts to singles, and we're in the head of everybody as [Kallianiotes] becomes more and more unglued." Though Cholodenko loves the famous diner scene in which Bob- by slow burns to a boil, telling off a stickler waitress and sweeping the tableware onto the floor, she says it's aided by Rafelson's choice to frame it against a window showing the landscape. "It's another great, brave tableau," she says. "It perfectly expresses tonally what the film is, this man having an identity crisis, feeling hamstrung and hogtied and suffocated. When he walks into this space, it's all about conformity." After dropping off Rayette at a motel, Bobby hops a ferry, and Rafelson once more takes time to frame Nicholson alone against the sky, only this time a cloudy Pacific Northwest one. "This kind of openness is just beautiful," says Cholodenko. "It's that classic motif, man against himself, isolated. It's foreboding. He's out to sea, basi- cally. And it's very different from that warm, salt-of- the-earth thing earlier, where it was a lot of magic hour. This is grey. There's something bleak and all that reflects where he is emotionally." Entering the family house, where a Mozart con- certo can be heard, Rafelson lets us discover the place with Bobby with a slow follow shot. In one room, brother Carl (Ralph Waite) plays piano with new girlfriend Catherine (Susan Anspach). In an- other, Partita is shaving their father, a silent figure in