Suddenly Last Summer

August 12 is Mother's Day here in Thailand so it's a strange coincidence that Suddenly, Last Summer is the next movie in The Film Experience's wonderful Hit Me With Your Best Shot series, and also a coincidence that my choice for best shot includes the crazy mother figure of Violet as she tries to shoo away the vultures picking at her dead son's estate ...

This shot is a point-of-view shot from the perspective of Violet's nephew, who is raiding the closet of Sebastian, Violet's dead gay son and the subject of what happened 'last summer'. Throughout this scene, the camera soaks in the details of Sebastian's room - male nude sketches, Grecian statues of male torsos, masks and skulls, and books and artefacts. It's a room filled with human culture, death and beauty, a refined (but also macabre) respite from the all-consuming plants and Venus-fly traps outside .

I chose this shot because it's an overt example of the 'male gaze'. In this shot, through the perspective of the nephew, we see two mothers talking about their children - one is aware of the harshness of the world and protective of her son's legacy (however crazy and sociopathic both of them may be), the other simple to the world and unaware of how her daughter is being played in Violet's game. And in the centre is Montgomery Clift as Sebastian's present surrogate, Dr Kukrowitz, his face lined with the same shadows as the mask beside him, and his body positions in the same as gay martyr St. Sebastian behind him (this is the other reason I like this shot - for the layers of symbolism put into the art design to overcome the Hollywood Code). For the nephew, all the harms, manipulations and injustices are playing out before him, and yet I think perhaps his only interest may be the fine white silk suits he has plundered from Sebastian's closet.

If the male gaze here is the surrogate for the audience's and society's own perspective, then the filmmaker with this shot brings into question where our interests lie. In the previous scene outside this room, Violet described to Dr Kukrowitz how her son saw the face of God as the innocent baby turtles were attacked by the birds on that day at the beach. Is mankind also like the birds? Are we too like the nephew here, not appreciative of beauty and compassion, only plundering the earth and ourselves for our own selfish wants and needs? As the plot progresses, these characters are shown to the extremes and the plot becomes very dramatic so that it's harder to put ourselves in their positions. But early on in the movie, it's a good question to ask.