As Michael Brody and
his friends carry the boat along the edge of the pond towards the bridge, little
Sean Brody, who has slipped under his mother’s radar, runs after them. There
follows a series of shots of bathers (both tourists and locals) filmed from just
above the water line, accompanied by a soundtrack of children’s shouts,
laughter and vigorous splashing. We then cut to a silent underwater shot,
showing the bathers from beneath. Their exposed white limbs scissor and kick as
the camera comes in close. This is the first underwater shot of the film that
does not represent the POV of the shark, which is something the viewer
intuitively grasps due to the absence of any music on the soundtrack.
A cut to one of the
spotter boats shows Hendricks raising a pair of binoculars and reporting a
possible sighting (‘Thought I saw a shadow.”) on his walkie-talkie. There is a
brief shot of Brody on the beach, somewhat sidelined from the main activity,
fiddling with the dials of his own radio, before we cut back to Hendricks from
a different angle. The shot frames the deputy on the right of the screen, an
expanse of water on the left with the the sun shining on it. He lowers the binoculars
and delivers his line (‘False alarm. Must be this glare’) It’s a moment that is
lifted directly from the novel, but, with its need for narrative efficiency, the
film script reduces half a page of dialogue (page 179 of the Fawcett paperback
edition) into two terse lines.
There is a cut to
another shot of bathers. The water laps against the bottom half of the screen as
the camera tracks from left to right, and whenever it submerges the sound cuts
out completely. It’s a deliberately disorientating effect, rather like (though
less sustained than) the one achieved by Kubrick in The Shining when Danny rides his tricycle across alternating
surfaces of carpet and bare flooring.
