The opening scene of a film has to accomplish so much in so little time. These scenes must immediately set the tone but not give too much away, still holding suspense. It’s a challenge that can make or break a movie. The Michigan Daily Arts writers are here to break down the greatest opening successes, from the most moody, serious French films to the impossibly ridiculous ones, all in a minute. Sixty seconds on the clock — on your marks, get set, read!
— Ben Luu and Campbell Johns, Summer Managing Arts Editors
“Beau Travail”
Naked contrast paints the opening frames of Claire Denis’ 1999 film. Despite opening on a brief panning of muraled walls that portray soldiers clustered in shadow, we feel the dry, oppressive heat of the day and can’t get the last of the dust out of our noses. A soldier’s chant rings out, one of the French Foreign Legion; we know this from the language and references to African sun, Madagascar and “Cochinchine” or, more contemporarily, southern Vietnam, all areas where the legion has been historically deployed. The viewer immediately understands they are situated on a foreign legion base, a tropical vestige of French colonial holdings, and the cast is comprised largely of members of the popular class. Whether young legionnaires or from the host country, the majority are Frenchmen pursuing a last chance at societal integration or nationals of relatively less wealthy countries seeking French citizenship.
After a few brief seconds establish this setting, a credits frame appears and then cuts to the interior of a teeming nightclub. The aridity of the day is forgotten as throngs of dancers shine with sweat. A young woman mimes an exaggerated kiss in tandem with a Turkish pop song about a promiscuous girl the singer longs to possess but can’t. Men and women gyrate, many just barely brushing each other, teasing; the men are invariably dressed in the uniforms of legionnaires, scalps shaved, the fashion and appearance of the women suggesting we are somewhere in East Africa. Our protagonist, Galoup (Devin Lavant, “Holy Motors”) is introduced attempting to dance beside a woman who gently but firmly rejects him — her eyes move to a new recruit, Sentain (Grégoire Colin, “Opium”), on whom Galoup fixates. Galoup, partnerless, looks on, hunches and fidgets with himself. A final cut shows a legionnaire laughingly blowing a kiss to his dance partner.
The play between rigidity and release, the austere chanting and white heat of the base at day and the loose, giddy dancing in the cloister of the nightclub, introduces the currents propelling life in the legion. It’s also flawlessly reevoked in the film’s final scene, which brings Galoup back to the same club for one of the most crushing, harmonious endings in cinema, mixing the envy, desire and tension which drive Galoup until the bitter end.
Daily Arts Writer Max Resch can be reached at nataljo@umich.edu.
“Mulholland Drive”
Stepping into a David Lynch work, one might expect the first few minutes to resemble the nightmarish opener of “Eraserhead” or even the atmospheric intro of “Twin Peaks”; “Mulholland Drive” does neither. Instead, it begins with a bright scene of people dancing the jitterbug. It’s inviting in nature, yet plants a seed of uneasiness into the viewer. An unsettling tension slowly builds beneath the cheerful surface — but then the dancing stops. A woman wakes up on her bed. Was it a dream? A nightmare?
But before one can even answer the question, Lynch plunges us into the night. A street sign that reads “Mulholland Dr.” is illuminated, an ominous synth plays in the background and the camera follows a lone car winding through the darkness. This sudden contrast from a dreamlike dance sequence to a midnight drive in Los Angeles can be jarring, but it works here. In essence, this is classic Lynch.
The opening to “Mulholland Drive” has elements found in all of Lynch’s work: mysterious imagery, a surreal blend between dreams and reality, an atmosphere that feels haunting and an exploration of the hidden darkness beneath normalcy. Together, these elements combine to create an opening sequence that sets the stage for a neo-noir filled with blue boxes, identity crises, terrifying dumpsters and bad espresso. Is it confusing at first? Of course. But in the end, it all makes sense. And it’s perfect.
Daily Arts Writer JC Rafal can be reached at rafaljc@umich.edu.
“The Boss Baby”
For years of my life, my mom swore she loved “The Boss Baby.” Like, she brought it up a lot. I took the bait and asked her why, and she pointed to the opening scene, unable to recall much else about the movie.
Way too far into my adult age, I watched “The Boss Baby” for the first time and couldn’t help but agree that the opening scene has an insane charm. It’s fucking weird, but it has a charm. We open on Boss Baby’s bare butt before he’s sent off on the baby assembly line heading to the storks shipping babies to their homes. The scene capitalizes on the cuteness of the babies, dousing them in baby powder, puffing up their pink cheeks and consistently panning to their little baby butts. It’s unfortunately adorable.
And as much as it sucks to admit, the world building here is actually pretty fascinating. The babies float in an artificially blue sky, on these industrial white assembly lines, going through typical baby tests like sucking pacifiers and getting booties stuck to their feet. But we know some babies, like our ever-confusing protagonist, will be chosen for a different path, for the life of briefcases and filing and stocks. The idea that some babies are simply destined for business, for khakis and pie-charts, is a moral landscape I find fun and maybe even a little frightening.
Nothing following this sickeningly sky blue, stork-filled fantasy scene, however, has ever been worth a watch — sorry Mom!
Summer Managing Arts Editor Campbell Johns can be reached at caajohns@umich.edu.
“Cléo from 5 to 7”
“Cléo from 5 to 7” is a black-and-white film, but you wouldn’t know it based on the first three minutes. Director Agnès Varda opens the film in color, showing a close-up of an old woman’s hands shuffling a deck of tarot cards. As the old woman places the cards on the table and asks the young woman across the table to split the deck, Varda cuts to a wide shot, with the hands of the two women in view. The tarot reader splays the deck and asks the young woman to pick nine cards from it. She complies, continuing the explanation of the tarot rules: “Three for the past, three for the present and three for the future.”
It’s clear from that very tiny injection that the young woman has thought a great deal about her life. At least, she’s thought about it enough to be familiar with tarot, yet uncertain enough about her life to pay for a reading. As the old woman flips the tarot cards up, a series of precise cuts follow — none of them, however, include the faces of the two characters. In fact, for the first three minutes, Varda simply shoots only the tarot cards, using close-up, medium and wide shots and relegating the characters’ dialogue to glorified voiceover.
The fascinating thing about the scene is how Varda conveys uncertainty — the same kind you’d feel if you hopped on a bus without knowing its route. Relatedly, on a podcast episode with Marc Maron, director Richard Linklater discussed a moment in his film “Boyhood” in which a character was texting and driving. Maron brought up how he felt unsettled by the scene, and Linklater said he had heard that comment before.
“People look at their phones while they are driving all the time, and most times, nothing happens,” Linklater said. “But, I guess, when you commit something to film, people expect something bad to happen, for some reason.”
It’s exactly the fact that Varda commits this innocuous scene of tarot reading to film which creates a prolonged feeling of unresolved, bubbling tension. The fact that both women are faceless, that only the table and the card are filmed, that the fortunes of this lady are told upfront, enrich and mystify an otherwise unnoteworthy moment. It’s a subversive opening, and the best part occurs when Varda breaks the spell. After the three-minute mark, Varda rapidly cuts to a medium shot of the tarot reader’s face in black-and-white, followed by a close-up of our protagonist, Cléo (Corinne Marchand, “La Melodie”), in tears.
What a hook. The confusion rises, the uncertainty doubles and the narrative of “Cléo from 5 to 7” finally unfolds.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
“Casino”
I know that when it comes to gambling, “the house always wins,” but I didn’t understand how heavily the odds are stacked in their favor until I watched “Casino.” While this entry into Martin Scorsese’s filmography may be one of his weaker works, “Casino” nails its first 40 minutes, giving us an intricate look at who is fixing the crooked games in Las Vegas, and the intricate system that keeps everything done in Tangiers Casino without anyone committing a crime.
The “money flow” of Tangiers is very excellently laid out in the first 20 minutes of “Casino” as our main characters Nicky (Joe Pesci, “The Irishman”) and Ace (Robert De Niro, “The Alto Knights”) narrate how the money is taken from customers in the pits of the casino all the way to the bosses, who control the Las Vegas Strip from thousands of miles away. Scorsese weaves an intricate tapestry that lets us vicariously experience what it is like to be at the top of the food chain in the gambling business. We snap from tracking shot to tracking shot, as the camera follows the different middlemen employed by the Mafia, henchmen who transport the “skimmed” money to the bosses and frontmen whose presence and involvement keep the Tangiers a seemingly legitimate operation. The music flows as we follow the men in and out of Vegas, transitioning from bombastic jazz solos inside the casino, to crooning Italian vocalists as the mob bosses convene over a spaghetti dinner.
But more than just giving a stylish overview of how the titular casino functions, the opening scene is a perfect introduction to our main leads, Ace and Nicky. Ace is appointed by the mob to run the Tangiers due to his ability to place bets that never fail thanks to his surgical attention to detail. He’s the brains behind the operation who makes sure the machine keeps running and the house keeps winning. Meanwhile, Nicky is the brawn of the operation. A churlish fellow, Nicky is in Vegas to make sure no one harms Ace as he runs the casino. Where Ace is logical Nicky is emotional; if Ace is a guaranteed winner because of his incredible knowledge and deduction ability, Nicky stays winning because he intimidates everyone into doing what he wants them to do. They’re natural foils — when Ace tries to understand why someone was hostile toward him making small talk about their pen, Nicky is already beating that person senseless with their pen to force them to apologize to Ace. The opening wonderfully establishes how they complement each other as characters, and how these differences could cause trouble down the line.
While the movie loses steam after this intro sequence, the first 40 minutes of “Casino” are mesmerizing and sink their hooks deep inside you with the movie’s fabulous cinematography, music and cast.
Daily Arts Writer Nicolas Eisenberg can be reached at niceisen@umich.edu.
