This is, essentially, 4 and a half minutes of a woman eating a pie. In other words, 4 and a half minutes of grief at its rawest and realest.
Still reeling from the death of her husband, she sits down, back against the kitchen counter, and eats her pie till we hit the 4 minute mark, at which point she gets up and dashes to the toilet to vomit it all out. Why is this scene so compelling? Let’s start with the fact that it’s a long shot. In most movies, everything is cut into bits and pieces that make up a narrative. For example, if a movie happens at home and at school, the character’s travel time in between home and school isn’t always shown, unless it’s important, or it’s shown once and then never again. Time is bite-sized and selectively presented, paced just right so the audience is always engaged and there’s always something happening. The long shot is where that goes out the window: it’s shot in real-time, there are no cuts, no hiding, no detraction from the entirety of that once scene. Furthermore, this isn’t a long shot where a lot happens — it’s literally just a woman eating a pie for the first 4 minutes, and even the ghost doesn’t move. Inevitably, we as an audience get bored. We remove ourselves from the world of the movie, think about our lives outside the theatre, stop paying attention to the scene. And that’s the point, see? Grief is a boring, still emotion. It’s silent and sad and empty, and that’s just the reality of it. There’s no drama to be found here, and so onscreen we get a boring and still and silent and sad and empty shot of a woman eating pie. The long shot, in being real-time, emphasises reality, and in being boring, emphasises the still numbness of real grief.
What it lacks in drama, this still shot makes up for in composition. The emptiness is conveyed through the depth of the shot, probably created by the use of a pretty wide lens. This blurs out the background and sharpens the woman, consequently making the room appear deeper relative to the screen, and thus larger and more empty. The women, despite the emptiness, is visually hemmed in by lines of the gold-ish side of the fridge, portraying that feeling of emptiness, but also that of being trapped. Furthermore, the great thing about the depth of the shot is that the toilet is always in view, allowing for a great focus pull when she gets up and dashes to vomit in the toilet. When she does so, the camera is still. We don’t see her face, or the way she vomits or anything because that isn’t the point. She becomes a small little figure in the frame, trapped by the lines of the toilet doorway, because grief makes us all small. It makes us small and weak and vulnerable and trapped, and here it is being conveyed in a purely visual way.
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