The most beautiful man in the world is a five minute short film written and directed in 20002 by Alicia Duffy. The story, which won a Chicago International Film Festival, London Film Festival and Hamburg International Short Film Festival award for Best Short Film, whilst also being nominated for a Bafta Award, shot Duffy to fame and lead her to direct her feature film debut, ‘All Good Children,’ in 2009.
Looking from a child’s prospective; the film challenges the audience’s perception of issues such as child neglect, and examines innocence of youth and paedophilia.
The beginning shots of the film show a young girl tiredly lying on her living floor and up against a radiator. The mise-en-scene shows a rundown dishevelled looking house, suggesting an underprivileged family home. This code is coupled with the dull and gloomy lighting of the shots. The young girl is falling asleep in front of the television, a problem with modern society that is often the topic of the media. Alongside the dirty looking house and her unclean person, she has a dog lying next to her; a situation which would often be considered as unsafe for a girl of her age. The close ups of her dominating the shots communicates that she is alone in this surrounding and this film will be very much about her. A small yawn immediately shows us her boredom.
Throughout this opening sequence the film fades to show a passing of time and enable credits to be seen. In-between each fade the action has skipped ahead a little bit, as what begins with the girl watching television, soon changes to her falling asleep and listening in on her mother’s conversations. This technique is the director’s other way to depict the boredom the girl faces as the time is lapsing.
Throughout the entire film although it is clear to us that this young girl is our protagonist, she has no name. She is not referred to by any form of identification and is never spoken to, whist she very rarely speaks herself. This is the director’s clever way of showing the girls sense of being and how, much like in the film, the character simply exists but does not pay much attention to her surroundings.
As we hear the diegetic sound of a phone ringing, a timid voice answers the call which we are led to presume is her mother. The voice and conversation suggests that the mother is young and possibly inexperienced with caring for young children. In a wide angle shot we see the young girl walk towards the window to look outside. This shot once again expresses the mothers neglect and the girl’s yearning for excitement. The house is being interpreted as a prison for the girl and is a metaphor to her entrapped life.
The picture immediately cuts to the girl outside, playing in the road on a bike with the dog watching. This wide angle shot is used to express her freedom. Its lighting is bright in contrast to the dullness of her home and the street is very bare with just a simple culdesac road. She is free and able to roam around happily momentarily. The dog, who shares the shot with her, stands watching her on the push bike almost guarding her safety. This links back to the shot of the dog sleeping next to her on the living floor, which although could be considered as unsafe, would not suggest that he is a friendly pet who respects his owners wellbeing.
With another quick cut to show a passing of time, the girl is first sitting on her bike staring out into the rural wilderness at the top of her road, before she ponderingly looks back towards her home. This immediately tells the audience that the girl has the urge to explore through the grass but her mother has probably forbidden it. As she looks back, the close up camera showing her face comes behind her to look out into the grass from over her shoulder, placing us on her side. Her final facial expression communicates to the audience that despite her mother’s obvious wishes, she has decided to continue on her exploration of the outside.
The girl walks towards the only obstacle stopping her from entering the wilderness; a fence, which she stands behind for a moment in thought. The wide angle shot which is from behind the girl shows us her dilemma. As she leaves the frame, the camera remains facing the location for a moment, before she re-enters the shot however on the other side of the fence. From the director’s rational, the fence in this shot was used as a metaphor to show the girl entering new territory. She stands the right side of the fence, leaves the frame, and then enters again on the other side of the fence, clearly showing us her bravery to enter new grounds and subliminally showing the audience her naivety and innocence on the other side of the safe barrier. However, in contrast, from the girl’s point of view the fence could be a metaphor for entrapped life, as she runs her hand along the fence panels is if they were bars of a prison cell.
Through the grass and greenery, many wide angle shots create the girl’s freedom while diegetic sounds of wilderness relax the audience and allow them to share this pleasurable experience with her. Once again jump editing is used as she waves her hand along some long grass. Everything remains exuberant the sound of her dog catches her attention. In a slow panning shot we are introduced to a young male whose torso is naked and he is stroking the dog. The young girl who has now found him amongst the grass, looks down at him and says her only line in the entire film, ‘that’s my dog.’ The man stands up and in two close up shots on the 180 degree line the young girl and older man are brought very personally together. The man notices a beetle crawling up the girl’s neck and gently grabs it with his hand before showing her. As he places it in her hands, the two facial shots become closer and as he gives her a smile, we see a trust in her eyes as she innocently smiles back. He has given her dog back and showed her an interesting bug which she finds a kind gesture. Following a wide angle shot which shows the two in the middle of a very secluded area, the man looks up and we are introduced to the face of a woman who we immediately presume is the girl’s mother. The following shot of the girl looking back towards her house with the woman at the front door, verifies her role. She is however, considering that her daughter is alone in some wilderness with a young man, surprisingly extremely calm. This encourages the audience to question who the stranger might be. It is common knowledge that a mother would instinctively do anything to protect her child, however she does not seem to care about this man. In the extremely intimate scene between the girl and stranger, Alicia Duffy wanted to make the audience believe he is a nasty man wishing to cause harm on the girl. With the mother’s reaction, the director has simply taken the film into a complete new direction and abandoned the controversial issues which had been depicted. From the mother’s reaction to the stranger, the audience could now be lead to presume that he in fact knows the two females and is not a stranger to them at all. His expression towards the mother could insinuate that he has had a relationship history with her and could even be the protagonist girl’s father. A simple shot dramatically flips the stomach wrenching edgy scene into what could be interpreted as a beautiful moment between a daughter and father figure.
Throughout the entire film Alicia Duffy challenges the audience’s five senses in many different ways. She uses the camera shots, mise-en-scene, sound elements and the general story to place us in each scene. At the beginning of the film in the dirty house we could almost smell the dirtiness which we could see through the set design. We can almost taste the dirt of her gloomy and dishevelled home. As the girl wonders around in the outside, we can imagine feeling the grass that she brushes past and the diegetic sounds are therapeutic. When the girl and stranger first encounter one another, Duffy knows what we as an audience have seen, read and are aware of through the media today, and so therefore uses these examples to create a gut wrenching feeling in our stomachs. We presume without consciously knowing we are and are sickened by the outcome.
In the film, after being spotted by her mother the young girl runs back to her house and a slam of the door shows her mother’s discontent towards her rebelliousness. The same wide angle shot of the outside wilderness shows the man on his own this time, possibly now even allowing us to feel sorry for him. With a saddened expression the girl sits back in her dark and gloomy house in a wide angle shot before a fade out. After the first credits, a fade back in shows us the final shot of the film; the girl sitting in front of the television, again reminding us of her neglect and disallowed happiness on her mother’s behalf.
