Evaluation Question 2

2. How does your film opening represent particular social groups?

       Eponymous character Margot is from a white middle-class background. Her mother is a workaholic single mother who has a high-flying career in the city, affording them a comfortable existence in a pleasant residential area. We established this location by filming her wandering through a fairly wealthy part of London. Margot's father lives abroad, and is distant in his relationship with his daughter which may account for the isolation she feels.

       Margot resembles Effie in Skins due to the fact they both grew up in a affluent household, yet have a dysfunctional family and deal with mental health issues. They are both aloof and possess an air of mystery, although Effie indulges in a lot of drug-taking and provocative activities, Margot prefers to be more solitary. She has a few friends, but steadily removes herself from them and the rest of the world throughout the film, a lot of the time because of misunderstanding. We chose to represent our main character in this way because teenage audiences usually react well to anti-heroes, particularly because rebellion against parents and conventional lifestyles is an ever present theme amongst adolescents. Because of the broken relationship with her family she represents the conflict that many others experience, and subsequent formation of an intense friendship with another figure that becomes a family-figure to her and replacement for the support and affection that she feels she missed out on.  Therefore we deliberately chose not to represent her mother in the opening so we could we could show her absence as normal and focus on the character development of Margot, particularly as it appears that her usual routine does not require any interaction with her mother and she is comfortable with that. However this representation of parental figures challenges certain stereotypes about middle class lifestyles as being a nuclear families, and the single-mother-no-father figure is instead habitually used in 'gritty' realism dramas about low-income families. Yet we acknowledged the idea that parents who are obsessively-career orientated often are not able to maintain functional relationships with their families.

       With her pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, Margot's looks are reminiscent of characters from typical Gothic literature because of their ethereal qualities. The character of Eva is a deliberately an 'exotic' contrast to Eva so as to represent the fact that she personifies all the characteristics that Margot feels could make her complete as a person. Thus Margot becomes obsessed with 'possessing' Eva. This theme is similar to the plot of Robert Altman's Three Women. We liked the idea of using unknown actors in our film because that way the audience is able to fully realise them as the character, and not just as a famous and recognisable actor playing yet another role.