Will ( Michael Vartan) is your regular clean-cut guy. Young Jake ( Dylan Smith) is cute as a picture. Mark Romanek, who wrote and directed the film, is sneaky in the way he so subtly introduces discordant elements into his perfect picture. A tone of voice, a half-glimpsed book cover, a mistaken order, a casual aside. they don't mean much by themselves, but they add up to an ominous cloud, gathering over the photo counter. ![]() Much of the film's atmosphere forms through the cinematography, by Jeff Cronenweth. ![]() His interiors at "Savmart" are white and bright, almost aggressive. You can hear the fluorescent lights humming. Through choices involving set design and lens choices, the One Hour Photo counter somehow seems an unnatural distance from the other areas of the store, as if the store shuns it, or it has withdrawn into itself. Customers approach it across an exposed expanse of emptiness, with Sy smiling at the end of the trail.Ī man who works in a one-hour photo operation might seem to be relatively powerless. But in an era when naked baby pictures can be interpreted as child abuse, the man with access to your photos can cause you a lot of trouble. What would happen, for example, if Will Yorkin is having an affair, and his mistress brings in photos to be developed, and Uncle Sy "mistakenly" hands them to Nina Yorkin? The movie at first seems soundly grounded in everyday reality, in the routine of a predictable job. When Romanek departs from reality, he does it subtly, sneakily, so that we believe what we see until he pulls the plug. There is one moment I will not describe (in order not to ruin it) when Sy commits a kind of social trespass that has the audience stirring with quiet surprise: Surprise, because until they see the scene they don't realize that his innocent, everyday act can be a shocking transgression in the wrong context. Watching the film, I thought of Michael Powell's great 1960 British thriller " Peeping Tom," which was about a photographer who killed his victims with a stiletto concealed in his camera. ![]() Sy uses a psychological stiletto, but he's the same kind of character, the sort of man you don't much notice, who blends in, accepted, overlooked, left alone so that his rich secret life can flower.
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