Gas Man

Gas Man is a Scottish drama set in 1997 directed by Lynn Ramsay and is about a family with a mother, father and two children who is having or has had a previous affair and has another set of children with another women.

For the first opening scene, not much dialogue was used and hardly none of the characters faces were shown. However for the plot and surroundings as to what the audience was seeing, they were not needed. The structure and style relates to its subject matter as there are lots of little highlighted moments which showed to the audience that something was going on "behind the scenes" with the dad of this family and the other women he met on the train tracks when meeting his other two children. One of these "highlighted"

moments is when the dad touches the women's hair who he has had an affair with. The pace of this shot is lsightly slowed down and therfore intensifies to the audience that something has occured between these two in the past or is still happening now.

Another element that stood out for me was when the daughter of the dad overly repeats that the other girl "said you were her daddy" over and over and it takes a while for the dad to say a reponse. This showed me that the little girl knows something has been happening between the women and her dad and the guilt in the dads feelings was shown through a high angle/point of view shot of the dad looking down on the girl in guilt.

The use of sound in this film is subtle and not much is used apart from at the party when various christmas songs are played. It's very ironic however that most of the christmas songs that are being played are happy and upbeat and people should be happy at christmas time, yet its clear the Dad is struggling at the fact of having two seperate families.

One of my favourite shots in this film is the
clips where the dad and the children are walking along the train tracks. Its a great wide shot as you can see on the right hand side, as you get the scenery of beautiful scotland in the

background, with the dad and his daughter in the foreground. I think that perhaps because this was a low budget film, I think the train tracks may have been used as a "dolly" so that tracking shots could be completed as there wasnt enough money in the budget for an official dolly and so the train tracks were used in two ways.

Overall, I did enjoy this film as it used a variety of shots and a good use of locations, particularly the train tracks for the use of a dolly.