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Clip description
Lisa’s (Phaedra Nicolaidis) once normal teenage life is thrown into chaos after her father Remo (Michael Futcher) crashes his plane on her 14th birthday. Her family and the town have difficulty adjusting to Remo’s disfigured appearance.
Curator’s notes
The clip portrays Lisa’s former carefree existence though a joyous bike ride in the fields. Life is abruptly turned around by her father’s crash on her birthday, seemingly linking their fates, as it is the same day her hair turns curly.
Lisa’s torture at having curly hair is, for her, on parallel with his disfigurement. She personalises the negative attention her father receives in mass and transfers the pain she feels over her father’s accident to pain about her unruly hair. She desperately wants her life to go back to normal and her hair becomes a motif, symbolic of normality and acceptance.
The potential horrific nature of Remo’s accident is amplified by the mise-en-scene and cinematography in this clip. The audience can only imagine the effects of the accident at this point as his face is always obscured by costume or the angle of the camera, but we get an idea from Lisa’s description of his face being like ’a bowl of spaghetti bolognese’, and the townsfolk’s shocked reactions to his appearance at mass.
