A few days ago my brother @sabreu and I watched for the fourth time the Argentine film Wild Tales, a set of 6 mini stories within the same film. My favorite story is the second one, so I took some time to enjoy it and my brother and I shared a lot interesting facts.

We realized that as the story went on the screen there were interesting cinematic details embedded in it and we had not noticed. My brother took the initiative to write everything we perceived, so I said Why not?

History - The Rats

A real estate and political entrepreneur arrives to a lonely restaurant, after going through a storm in the middle of the route. The waitress immediately recognizes him as Cuenca, the man responsible for several economic conflicts in his family, that led to her father's suicide. The cook of the place, a rather somber character, suggests to the waitress to kill him silently with rat poison, but she can not convince her.

^{Wild Tales, We can all lose control. (Original poster)}

Fragment of the analysis

^{This video didn't have subts, so we added them for you to understand.}

Javier Juliá did a wonderful job with the cinematographic language. Clean, rough and with rich information about the characters involved in the scene. A combination of environments that captures us and immerses us fully in the Argentine film.

To enjoy this analysis, we classify the information by planes. Being a short story, each shot contains valuable information in the context of the scene to tell us much more than the dialogues could say. So, let´s not wait... Let's start!

Take nº.1 Sequence.

• Quality of light: In this sequence we can see the light hard at the beginning, to separate an environment from the other, but at the same time dark completely covers the face of the cook, reflecting evil in her and symbolically indicating her possible bad intentions. Upon entering the kitchen, the bluish color represents the completely cold temperature and it is projected in the zenith direction, which illuminates the entire kitchen in a soft way.
• Depth of field: At the beginning the depth of field is wide to know the place, and then the frame closes towards the waitress. Change the depth and minimize to detail only the bottle of poison in front of the waitress.
• Angle and camera positioning: the sequence maintains a horizontal angle, but both figures are shown almost entirely in a back position.
• Frame: Starts in the medium-long plane, it stays that way but when focusing the bottle, we get a close-up.
• Camera movement: Soft panning with Dolly forward, followed by a slight movement to the right.

Take nº.2

• Quality of light: Soft, cold and warm light for ambient separation.
• Depth of field: Average, to be able to detail the entire kitchen but blur the client, so we do not forget about him. In this plane, the 3 actors are appreciated, but the waitress and the cook have the main focus at that moment.
• Angle and camera positioning: horizontal angle.
• Frame: Medium long shot.
• Camera movement: fixed.

Take nº.10

• In order to understand the story from the point of view of the psychology of color, we must emphasize some things:

First, watch this:

In the initial credits, it is appreciated that as the names of the actors appear, they change the photos of the animals simultaneously and this makes us think that each character will have a behavior (personality) similar to the animal that appears in each Photo.

Now watch this:

The story that concerns us, is full of surprises and details. One of the most interesting is the cook's knife. And we say the cook's knife, because obviously it belongs to her, because in any kitchen they would not allow the use of an utensil knowing that it could have been the cause of someone's death. It is literally marked on the sheet with a simple name "LEON".

• Who is Leon (a person)?
• What represents Leon, the wild animal or is a reference to the movie Leon the professional, revealing to us in advance that it is a murderer?
• Is it a simple knife?
• The cook has a nickname to her knife?

We prefer to say that it is a preamble for what is about to happen. If we go back to the previous curious fact, the cook is represented with a photo of a silverback gorilla (Rita Cortese). A very volatile and aggressive animal when it wants to attack or defend its herd. And if we see in the introduction of the film, the waitress (Julieta Zylberberg), is represented by an innocent lamb. After all, she is going to defend an innocent being from the injustice that she has lived through.

Although this story is quite short, it is very interesting. Represents a number of emotions at a specific time. Three completely different beings confronted. Each one with its own history. They found themselves in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

You can not miss this one or the rest of the stories within the movie. Although they are fictional stories, it shows us several examples of what human beings really are when they lose their heads. You´ll be grateful for not being inside the movie and for being in the comfort of your home, seeing how these lost souls fall apart, because at some point, it can be any of us.

Thank you very much for taking a few minutes to read our post. I hope you've had a good time and we hope you watch the whole movie, because it´s really worth it.

Sometimes we have to give the chance to Latin American cinema, because in this case, I assure you that you will not regret it.

See you next time!

Follow @sabreu for the awesome collab!

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^{All images and gif were made by us from the youtube video except the posters of the film.
The dividers were created by me.}

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://nairesc.rockdio.org/2018/08/29/cinematographic-analysis-wild-tales-the-rats-ft-sabreu-2/

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