La critique de London City's nights (2)

 

Crucially, this depiction of disabled life feels honest and accurate. The film takes pains to highlight both the ways in which our leads overcome their disabilities and the myriad frustrations and inconveniences they experience every single day. Cleverly, Enthoven sets much of the first act of the film within the character’s houses.  

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Most of these opening scenes feature them interrupting conversations or private moments, or even just as an omnipresent background presence.  They’re well meaning, but this and the architecture of the houses creates a suffocating atmosphere.  

 

Conversely, after they escape to the road Enthoven switches to wide shots of landscapes: glistening seas, rolling fields, open starry skies and sun-dappled woodlands - the natural world bringing exhilarating liberation. It's interesting to note how the colour palette evolves throughout the film, beginning with overcast, flat strip lighting and gradually increasing in saturation as our characters get closer to their destination.

 

All of this underlines the division between the cold sterility of interiors, which are conflated with the restrictive nature of the wheelchairs, and the fleshy, tactile pleasures of the outside world.  So, appropriately, the first shots of the film are of breasts bouncing along a beach, lasciviously observed by Peter from a balcony.  But you quickly note that these are breasts shot with a conscious,horny male gaze;they’re totally divorced from their owner disembodied objects of desire