Ana Saavedra

Professor Suzanne Leonard

English-221
2 March 2016
Jamie Sees As Aurelia Goes Swimming Feminist Theory
Nine intertwined stories about friendship and heteronormative love are present in Love
Actually. One of the stories revolves around Jamie, a writer who retreats to a cottage in France
after discovering that his girlfriend is sexually involved with his brother. As he works on a new
novel, the only person with whom he regularly interacts is his maid Aurelia, who only speaks
Portuguese, hindering verbal interactions.
Jamie and Aurelia Go Swimming takes place in two locations. The first location is
inside the cottage. Here Jamie is shown writing on his desk. During this section of the scene,
Aurelia is seen tidying up after the male protagonist, and only stops to help him find the mobile
phone he has misplaced in his untidy desk. She is Jamies subordinate and is working for her
male counterpart, reinforcing patriarchal ideology of women cleaning up after men.
The camera frames Aurelias torso out of focus in the background as the scene begins.
When the shot changes, Aurelias body comes into focus as we see her from the thighs up. She
begins as part of the background, but becomes more important as she moves into Jamies
workspace to clean after him and to find his phone. Her only close-up in this section of the scene
is of her arms and a small portion of her torso as she finds the ringing phone in Jamies mess.
This is quickly followed by a quick medium long shot of the two characters. Seeing as she is not
the main focus of the scene until the moment she finds the phone, the cinematic apparatus
doesnt pay much attention to her until the close-up.

The scene jumps straight away to the second location, taking place outside the cottage
where Jamie is writing by a lake. When we first see Aurelia she is walking from the background
to the foreground to bring Jamie a new cup of coffee, once again reinforcing her position as the
male protagonists attendant. When she grabs the empty mug, pages of his manuscript get blown
away with the wind into the lake, causing her to undress and jump into the lake to retrieve them.
This too reinforces her level of servitude towards Jamie.
A turning point occurs in this part of the scene when, for the first time, Jamie starts
seeing Aurelia in a romantic and/or sexual way as she undresses to jump into the lake to save his
manuscript. As she runs towards the lake, we see the first long and extreme long shots of her
figure in the scene. As she reaches the end of the dock, the camera follows her body from her
feet all the way up to her head with a tilt shot. From that moment until she jumps into the water,
the camera only shoots her from behind. The following shot of her is a tilt shot from a close-up
of her head to her lower back as she begins to discard her dress, and after a tilt shot from her
thighs, down to her feet, and back up to her behind. Aurelia is then shot in a close-up of her head
that after a few seconds tilts down until the camera reaches her lower back, where the shot lasts a
few more seconds focusing on the tattoo on that area of her body. We then see a medium shot of
her, followed by an extreme long shot as she dives into the lake. It is during these shots that the
woman becomes the main focus of the scene. The rest of the scene is mostly made up of medium
shots, but her head and sometimes shoulders are the only visible parts of her body, since the
water is covering the rest of her body. During these shots the camera seems to follow her as she
picks up the damaged pages of the manuscripts.
Its important to observe that all of Aurelias close-up shots are interrupted by a shot of
Jamie observing her and seem to be from his point of view. This reinforces Mulveys theory that

the gaze of the male character controls the cinematic apparatus, and that women connote to-belooked-at-ness. The gazes of Jamie and of the spectator, due to the camera being controlled by
him, imply a sense of scopophilia that plays on the viewer's voyeuristic fantasies. It also turns the
female body into a performer and an erotic object for both the male character and the audience.
This split between the woman as a spectacle and the man as the commander of the gaze
reinforces too the power dynamic of passive female and active male.
The way the gaze fragments Aurelias body during the scene also shows Mulveys ideas
that fragmentation destroys the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative and gives flatness.
This fragmentation may also be seen as a way the male unconscious tries to escape the castration
anxiety represented by the penis-less female body by fetishizing a singular part of her body, in
this case her lower back displaying a tattoo. According to Mulvey, fetishizing a part of the body
builds up its physical beauty and transforms it into something satisfying in itself.
Overall, the scene very much reinforces patriarchal ideology; Jamie has power over
Aurelia due to his position as her employer. Mulveys theory that the cinematic apparatus is an
extension of the male protagonists, making the female body something to-be-looked-at and
supporting the active male / passive female separation, is also very clear and present in the scene.
This leads to the scopophilic and voyeuristic fantasies in the male character and the audience that
Mulvey argues cinema satisfies.