The Look of Being Lost

How shallow focus has become the favorite way for filmmakers to show a sense of disconnect.

“Sugar” cinematographer Andrij Parekh may be the most prolific purveyor of short focus in recent American indie cinema. In Fleck and Boden’s debut “Half Nelson,” he provided similarly hazy backdrops for the crack-addicted high school teacher protagonist played by Ryan Gosling. Likewise, in Sophie Barthes’ new metaphysical comedy “Cold Souls,” Parekh employs several disorienting out-of-focus shots to reflect a sort of existential leakage in the character’s identities.

When Paul Giamatti’s soul-aching actor rides the Roosevelt Island aerial tramway back and forth several times in the film, the city lights behind him form strange, colorful, flickering orbs. And in the story of Nina, a Russian “soul mule” who traffics essences between America and Russia and is slowly losing her sense of self, Parekh devised a new technique to capture the character’s bleary state: He placed his short-sighted glasses over the camera lens. “Cold Souls” even relies on a distorting effect for its last potent image, using the long lens to blur its protagonists into an enigmatic oblivion.

In recent art cinema, however, there’s probably no better example of a character wandering through life in a dissociative, blurry haze than “Morvern Callar,” the protagonist of Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 cult wonder of the same name. Another headless woman, Callar shares much with Lucrecia Martel’s Vero. Unable to deal with a trauma and the resulting guilt or grief, both women flee the site of their respective calamities and venture out into worlds without clarity or focus.

Samantha Morton’s Callar often appears against soft backdrops as a way of showing her disconnection with reality. In one memorable image early on, Callar sits at a computer in the foreground, seemingly unperturbed as her dead boyfriend, having just killed himself, lies in the blurred background beneath a white sheet beside the flickering lights of a Christmas tree. Those blinking lights — so prevalent in the out-of-focus backgrounds of many a long lens close-up — call out to the viewer here; suggesting that what lies in the obscure depths of the frame is not to be overlooked, but expresses the hidden tumult that exists just below the surface of the characters.

[Additional photos: "The Headless Woman," Strand Releasing, 2008; "Three Monkeys," Zeitgeist Films, 2008; "Cold Souls," Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2009; "Morvern Callar," Cowboy Pictures, 2002]

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