Unlike many other dystopian movies and TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale is a mediation on beauty and esthetics that conceal terrible acts of people. This series was based on Margaret Attwood’s book and initially directed by Reed Morano, who set the tone for other directors. The story tells about a new totalitarian regime that came into power on the territory of the United States, where the fertility rates dropped significantly because of environmental pollution and sexually transmitted diseases. The government of Gilead, the new country, enslaved all women capable of childbearing and forced them to become handmaids. The director did an incredible job by using shallow focus to tell a horrifying story through the lens of the main characters.
Morano’s primary technique of narrow focus allowed her to focus on the characters’ emotions and perceive the terror of the polished streets and houses of Gilead. The first episode starts with the hunt, which shows a larger perspective, attracting spectators’ attention to the surroundings, the road, and cars. However, as the chase approaches an unfavorable outcome, the camera narrows its focus on the main character’s face, which displays fear and hope simultaneously.
Later scenes seem to make the characters’ emotions, camouflaged under white coifs, the center of attention because their facial expression demonstrate that their words are not their true thoughts. Handmaids’ costumes of red color and white caps represent their particular class of slaves whose only mission is to give birth to children of the totalitarian state’s leaders. Although the red color symbolizes passion, the closed design of their dressing depicts an extreme religious perspective of the new regime. Moreover, the shallow focus suggests how people’s inattentiveness to their surroundings leads to the regress of democratic society back to slavery, armed with digital technologies.
To summarize, the first director of The Handmaid’s Tale, Reed Morano, utilized one of the modern techniques of shallow focus. It allowed her to capture the characters’ emotions and enable viewers to be amazed and horrified by the beautiful world created by slaveowners and murderers in the position of power. Overall, the chosen method of visualizing the story changed the audiences’ perception of the world, usually unnoticed because of their extreme concentration on screens and unimportant issues.