Scenes From A Movie: The Opening Images In Marty Supreme- Foreshadowing Or Coincidence?
Is Josh Safdie making the first three images do a lot of heavy lifting, or is it just a case of reading too much into it?
Timothée Chalamet has been in hot water lately over his comments about opera and ballet, but I want to take a moment to instead look at the movie he’s been promoting— specifically, the opening images of Marty Supreme, because it’s been on my mind for some time.
They say that a picture speaks a thousand words. If the first image in a film can capture what it’s about, or set up what’s going to play out, it accomplishes a lot of heavy lifting for the story— with the added bonus of hooking the viewer’s attention.1 And I’m wondering if Marty Supreme‘s opening image is letting us know the duration of time in which the story plays out.
The film’s first three shots are all extreme close-ups. The first image is an extreme close up of the number 9 1/2.
Followed by a reverse extreme close-up of Marty Mouser (Timothée Chalamet) looking at a box (it’s blurry but still noticeable)…
And in the same shot, Marty looks up at the shelf above…
And then we get another extreme close-up of the number 8 1/2 on a similar box as shown in the first image.
Right after, we cut away to reveal that Marty is in a stock room filled with shelves of boxes. He swaps boxes, and later, we’ll realize that he deliberately took a smaller shoe size to convince his customer to buy a more expensive pair of shoes.
The scene tells us, quickly and very economically, a bunch of things about the titular protagonist: Marty works in a shoe shop, he’s a salesman, he’s good at talking people into things (well, mostly), and above all, he’s a hustler.
But when you think about it, the numbers also happen to correspond to the story’s timeline, which is about nine months— maybe nine-and-a-half. We will learn this because a few minutes later, Marty impregnates his childhood friend and lover Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion) in the very same shoe stockroom; and Marty Supreme ends with the protagonist looking at his weeks-old newborn baby.
We also see Rachel going into premature labor after she gets shots during an entire episode involving a gangster, his dog, and an antisemitic farmer, four weeks before her due date, right before he’s supposed to go to Tokyo for the exhibition match. Which would be about maybe eight-and-a-half weeks since the film’s beginning?
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m reading too much into this. As I wrote above, the close-ups could simply be to indicate why Marty took a different shoe box when he later talks the old lady into buying the shoes he really wants her to buy. Maybe it’s just all a coincidence.
Or maybe it was deliberate. I don’t know. That’s the fun thing about art: it is open to interpretation. If, however, the choice of shots was designed to set up the frame of time in which Marty Supreme takes place, I take my hat off to director Josh Safdie— it’s an effective way of layering the opening image(s) into a kind of Chekov’s gun, using nothing but extreme close-up of numbers to indicate that it will go off, uh, prematurely.2
Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.
Long live the movies!
D.L. Holmes
Or least one can be hopeful in this Age of Chronic Distraction.
Pun not intended. Or was it?