Lighting provides light into the character's pasts...

Rating: Null/10 (16 March 2011)

The lighting in this movie is phenomenal and very expressive. Rick's Café Americain provided the perfect scene in which to express various lighting techniques that foreshadowed the pasts and the futures of the characters that found refuge there. Particular attention was paid to Ingrid Bergman's character where the light dazzled in her eyes, caught the top of her hair, and shadowed her face in the reflection of a mysterious woman with pain and sorrow as much as happiness and joy. The bars that shadowed the walls in the scenes that peaked into Rick's office, as if we were spying or stumbling onto something forbidden, portrayed the secret lives of Rick and Ilsa and the cage that not only they, but others caught in the net set by the Nazi's, lived in.