Our Characters

OUR CHARACTERS:

In our film opening, we show our two main characters. One is female, and the other is male. For our male role, the character has a very casual and relaxed personality. We decided to represent his personality through what he wears as the mise-en-scene of him being in a hoodie, jeans and with headphones round his neck represents his gender. However, since its a rom-com, sterotypically the male role is normally smart and sophisticated therefore he challenges the stereotype of males in this film genre. We expect him to be in a suit or dressed a lot more smarter and in a more appealing enviroment. However our female character Nina is potrayed as safisticed, seeing her for the first time will be in Central London, in Oxford Street. We see her dressed very smart and she looks very snobby. She also walks into Starbucks and past many 'posh' shops. The costume for Nina is a blazer, smart shirt, trousers and heels. To show the audience a clear contrast in our two main characters. Having Nina dress like this challenges her character in the film genre, but not her gender stereotype as a woman would wear heels and dress a lot nicer compared to a man.

I feel as if the characters do challenge stereotypes. In a sense of who they are since normally it would be the female that is the casual one and the man would be the "business" man and the sophisticated one in Central London. But this was challenged since we used the female role as the sophisticated one instead of the male. So in this sense the gender's were challenged. Some examples that was used to challenge the gender stereotypes would be things like location, clothing etc. For example, when you think of Central London you would think of business men in their suits going into their offices, whereas we used the Central London location for our female actress and that is where she would be introduced.

Levi-Strauss's theory is what we have used to show the gender representation. But instead of a hero vs villain, supernatural vs human, we chose to do it more subtly like the upper class v working class. Personally, I believe that this creates tension between two characters but they would be so different and it would be interesting to see two complete different people together. It is also cliche which most people (even if they don't admit it) love to see.