We should be thankful that the gore in Atomic Blonde has largely survived the Central Board of Film Certification’s watchful eye. We are barely surprised that the nudity and lesbian romance have been severely trimmed in the August 11 release. But we are truly gobsmacked by a crucial action sequence that appears to a single long take, but isn’t.
Directed by David Leitch and adapted from Sam Hart’s graphic novel The Coldest City, Atomic Blonde is set in the 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. Charlize Theron’s Lorraine is the British spy sent to Berlin to investigate the death of a fellow agent. Lorraine meets several Russian agents as she tries to protect a German agent (Eddie Marsan), and in one of the film’s most stunning set pieces, she fights off her attackers for 10 whole 10 minutes.
The sequence is designed as one long uninterrupted take, but it actually comprises 40 separate shots that were fused together, said a report in the trade publication Variety. A similar trick was used in Alejandro Gonzales Inarittu’s Birdman (2014), which presents the rehearsals for a play by fading superhero actor Riggan Thomas as a single, continuous shot.
Other directors have actually made entire films without resorting to computer-generated gimmickry. Alexander Sokurov’s masterful Russian Ark (2002) is a 96-minute one-take account of a French aristocrat’s tour of the 33 rooms of the Russian State Hermitage Museum.
Sebastain Schipper’s 138-minute German movie Victoria (2015) is another single-take piece of audacity, shot between 4.30am and 7.30am on location. The shooting style matches the subject: a Spanish woman on a night out with a local and his gang gets involved with robbery, kidnapping and murder.
For Atomic Blonde, the sequence was shot chronologically all the way through, Variety reports. The editor, Elisabet Ronaldsdóttir, “was on set for the entire sequence to make sure each of the cuts worked, since the goal was to make those transitions as invisible as possible”. The report adds, “Sela elaborates: “We had to choose the take we wanted right there, and that’s the one we’d have to match to.” That meant the next shot had to be framed almost identically and, if the handheld camera was moving (which it nearly always was), the shot had to be picked up at the same angle and momentum.”
The sequence has not arrived unmolested in India. The censor board, in its zeal to stamp out profanity not only in Bollywood but also in Hollywood, has added its own editing trick to the sequence. The deadliest of the attackers has Lorraine in a tackle, and he refers to her as a “bitch”. She gets the better of him and spits back, “Am I your bitch now?” The offensive word has been bleeped out. The censor board’s campaign to make lip readers out of Indian audiences is certainly succeeding.