So first of all, those big music scenes really are impeccably produced <how? explain what mades them so impeccable?>. The mise-en-scène (Gibbs, 2002) is on point <re word>, with each and every movement in these scenes deliberately placed to fit with each track. It <dont start a sentance with THIS OR IT, tell us what IT is>? creates a real sense of adrenaline during the action scenes HOW , but surprisingly there’s a couple of calmer scenes that still work with this mantra. The Harlem Shuffle credits scroll is a particular favourite, with the lyrics of the song marked on the environment surrounding Baby as he walks across the street. These details make each watch of the film ever more satisfying as you spot more of these little music synchronisations on each run through. 

Alongside this, the plot services these scenes well, giving the story they tell the structure that is necessary in Hollywood filmmaking (Sykes, 2013) <FILM REVIEWS DONT REALLY HAVE REFERENCES LIKE THIS IN THEM, CAN SAVE FOR BIBLIOGRAPHY>. It’s <NO ITS> nothing extraordinary with the film following a typical three-act structure, and the story focusing on a boy trying to escape a life of crime and falling for a girl, but with the focus on the musical action scenes it’s expected that the plot wouldn’t go above and beyond in the same way.  

This <AAH NO WHAT IS 'THIS'> becomes a problem though when you look at how the women in this film are written <WRITTEN OR PORTRAYED?>. The two most prominent women in this film, Debora and Darling, are primarily shown to us as love interests to the male protagonist and eventual antagonist, Baby and Buddy. This film’s approach to writing mirrors Classical Hollywood with Institutional Modes of Representation (Burch, 1973), which is most definitely not a good thing when it comes to writing women (Hein, 2006). Using semiotic analysis, we see that women are presented as the “not-man” here, and so play towards binary opposites. Baby is powerful, so Debora is powerless. Baby is stoic <BECOMING MORE OF AN ESSAY THAN FILM REVIEW> and unemotional, so Debora must be emotional. This way of writing women forces their representations into an unrealistic box, a box that represents how the rich white men who ran Classical Hollywood wanted to see women. 

Overall, Baby Driver is a strong film, with fantastic use of mise-en-scène <how explain> allowing it to elevate its action sequences above its competition. The plot also serves the film well, but the representation of women lets it down from being a true classic, and I believe this will be the aspect that ages the film the most. 

Bibliography (not annotated yet): 

Burch, N. (1973). Theory of film practice. London: Secker & Warburg. 

Gibbs, J. (2002). Mise-en-scène : Film style and interpretation (Short cuts). 

Hein, C. (2006). Laura Mulvey, visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Norderstedt: GRIN. 

Sykes, C. (2013). Creating Perfect Plot and Structure How to Craft a Great Story: Teach Yourself (Teach Yourself). Hodder & Stoughton. 

Wright, E. (Director). (2017). Baby Driver [Film]. Sony Pictures. 

In the beginning Sabrina is undesirable. This is told from a masculine perspective and it’s ideals of a beautiful woman. She gets depressed as David doesn’t acknowledge her. So, she is sent to Paris to grow as a person. But why she is really in Paris, is her to become a woman. Laura Mulvey writes in her phenomenal text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema that women are passive, ‘to be seen’ and men are the active, the bearer the look (Mulvey, 1974, p. 10) SAVE THIS FOR YOUR ESSAY CW2. Mulvey calls this phenomenon the male gaze. In Sabrina the male gaze defines Sabrina’s life as she is judged based on her beauty and her looks. 

Sabrina is even spoken in third person, emphasizing the objectification. In the film, Linus tries to cheat Sabrina into falling in love with him, in order to save his son from Sabrina’s attraction as David is going to marry another woman. As Linus fells in love with Sabrina, he sees into her and sees her inner beauty. The second half of the film is really about the desire of Linus, rather than of Sabrina or David. This creates a narrative tension between the two main characters as Linus emerges from the plot to become the solid point of view of the male gaze to the viewer. Murray Smith writes in his book Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and Cinema that the viewer’s focalization is a process of a structure of a sympathy (Smith, 1995, p. 73). The focalization process in Sabrina is made of introducing Sabrina as the main character and then, very fluidly, switching it to the POV of Linus. 

The patriarchal focalization cements the male gaze to Sabrina as a thematic implication. The film that started as a tale about a lovesick woman, turns to be a tale about a woman who is only defined by male recognition of her physical fertility. By this narrative and cinematic logic, Sabrina follows the Institutional Mode of Representation (see Burch, 1979), the hegemonic way of telling a story through the cinematic medium. So to recap, Sabrina is on the surface, a romantic comedy (a decent one I should add). But under the surface, it’s through social meanings rise which are related to Hollywood’s obsession with controlling women with certain objectified narratives. 

 

References

 

Burch, N. (1979). Film's Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response. October, 11/ Winter. USA: MIT Press, pp. 77-96. 

Foucault, M. (1974) History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books. 

Mulvey, L. (1974). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16/3. pp. 6-18. 

Smith, M. (1995). Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press