Screening Notes

In a very quick shot, there is a shot of a man and a woman talking intimately at a dinner table in a restaurant. There are people behind them, and there is another woman in the shot. The female is smoking a cigarette, and the man has her hand grasped between his. The shot is a POV from another woman across the table. The man is talking and the woman is listening.

This dinner talk is a symbol of the main character's infidelity to his wife, who holds the POV. The shot is quick because the wife is only taking quick glances to look, and the people around him show that he does not even try very hard to keep the fact that he flirts and teases with other girls a giant secret. Him talking, holding HER hand, and her listening and smoking also show that he is the predator of the conversation, the initiator that is holding the conversation afloat. He was not roped into it or was not manipulated. This shot symbolizes early on in the film how terrible the relationship between the two main characters actually is. The smoking of the cigarette symbolize the woman as the one in the affair, as cigarette smoking is usually associated with the more bad characters and the ones doing things that are considered "against the norm".

If I were to make it a myth, I would say that from this shot, you can believe that this man has cheated on his wife before, and possibly multiple occasions. The clearly apathetic demeanor towards his own wife, across the dinner table, is showing that his feelings towards her do not extend far. He also does not car about embarrassing her or himself at this very public dinner. Just from this shot alone, I would not be very surprised if there was a past of infidelity  between the two main character's, which I predicted in the previous paragraph. Otherwise I would have only believed them bored within their marriage and now stuck with each other, and that being the biggest problem in their relationship.