Body English

I love this frame grab from the long-running British TV crime series “Wire in the Blood.” One of the motifs of the story is the never-to-be-acknowledged ache of sexual tension between a female cop (Hermione Norris) and a slightly off-kilter profiler of serial killers (Robson Green). In the episodes I’ve seen this mutual attraction is never a subject of discussion and is expressed only with body language, notably by a tendency of their faces to drift closer and closer together, the framing becoming slowly tighter and tighter, during intense professional conversations. The staging of the scene pictured above is unusual because it involves a cut to a long shot. We see the exact dimensions of the hallway they’re standing in and can tell at a glance that there’s no good reason for them to be this close together. Even more revealing is Norris’s posture. She’s not so much being backed up against the wall by an unwanted intrusion into her airspace as reclining against it, with her arms hanging loose at her sides. Submissively, one might almost say. All in all, a very vivid image of two people in the midst of being turned on by each other.