It's a bright and pretty tableau — the dark color of the men's skin is beautifully set against the shimmering blue water — but there's something else here, a shiver of unease.
Then sudden flashes of light revealed enigmatically pretty tableaux: a boy flying a kite; young men clambering up walls; a woman showering with a watering can; another woman opening a box, out of which floated a balloon.
McQueen arranges his actors in a series of long-held, reluctantly pretty tableaux, as mannered as a landscape of the Hudson River School as something, in other words, that Northup might have had the cultivation to appreciate.
Guided by Oprah Winfrey's pushy narration and an overwhelming barrage of talking heads, we watch as brightly dressed West Africans are posed in pretty tableaus or alone against a blazing sunset.
That little tableau should give you a pretty good sense of why the event needed to exist, but I asked some of the demonstrators what the tragedy meant to LA's French community.
"What a pretty, pretty, pretty Little Man".
This is a pretty improbable scenario.
A pretty desperate situation.
It's a pretty small hole.
This is a pretty clear concept.
