One Shot: How 'Die My Love' captures the 'rotten' underbelly of a marriage

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If fortune favors the bold, Seamus McGarvey found cinematic gold framing a beach scene in Lynne Ramsay’s psychological drama “Die My Love” — starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson — where background figures seem to fade into the water.“This effect was a total accident that Lynne and I both embraced once we saw it.

It’s caused by multiple reflections in a series of filters and we were both like, ‘Oh, my God, look at how the water inhabits their souls.’ It felt very spectral and almost phantasmagorical and certainly not a depiction of a truth.It was all the things we needed the shot to say,” he recalls.

Steeped in first-person portraiture, the film depicts peripheral characters obliquely, like a shadow without a body.Its use of a claustrophobic frame, swirly bokeh and color bias celluloid deepen a mother’s downward spiral.

“Lynne and I wanted to depict a kind of subjective sensibility,” says McGarvey.“We were shooting in real environments, but we wanted to render these spaces with a certain amount of distortion of reality.

We shot on film but on Ektachrome reversal stock as it gave us a nostalgic feel, allowing us to create a dream that was gradually corroding and unraveling in front of our eyes.We wanted that sense of sugared hopefulness that was ultimately rotten at its epicenter.”Get exclusive awards season news, in-depth interviews and columnist Glenn Whipp’s must-read analysis straight to your inbox.

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