Analysis Of Sliding Doors

Sliding doors is a 1998 film; it is a romantic comedy. The film is based around the main character Helen, played by Gwyneth Paltrow; the narrative film follows her on two different paths of her life. The plot splits into two parallel universes and shows the two possible path Helen could take depending on whether she catches a London Underground train or not.

Sliding Doors is the most relevant film to our concept as it explores a double narrative and the protagonist in both Sliding Doors and our film are faced with some very important decision making. Also we would like to set the location of the point where our protagonist has to make the decision at a train station (similar location to Sliding Doors) where he will be faced with the decision of either helping the lady up or getting on his train.

To distinguish the two different lives in Sliding Doors there is a sound effect used at the point where the mains characters life changes. Even though the two lives aren’t completely different we see certain parts of it that are; such as when  Helen catches the train she later on catches her boyfriend having an affair but when she doesn’t catch the train she continues to live her life with her unfaithful boyfriend. This parallel narrative is similar to the concept of our short film because depending on whether he chooses to help the lady or get on the train results in whether he has a happy life or not.

Below is the poster for Sliding Doors this is another feature we have looked at is the poster of Sliding doors, as we are creating a poster is one of our ancillary tasks. This poster of very effective, as it shows the 2 different paths of life that the main character Helen could lead, one at the top of the poster where she her hair is dyed and she is wearing makeup making her look very glamorous and the other upside down at the bottom of the poster where she looks more natural. When it comes to producing our poster we may decide to do something similar with the two lives however we wouldn’t be able to use someone face to sell the film like Sliding Doors. As our actors won’t be recognised by a wide audience unlike Gwyneth Paltrow.