In this scene, Kay is expressing her desire to take the children and leave Michael. She is fed up with the lies that Michael tells to the world and to her. As Kay is unconfidently conveying her will to leave him, the camera is angled so that the audience is viewing Michael from behind her head. We see Michael’s signature peering eyes menacingly gazing not only at Kay, but at us. This two-shot switches back and forth between Kay and Michael while they are talking about Kay’s want to leave him and Michael’s promise that he can change. When the camera is facing towards Michael from Kay’s point of view, the audience feels the pressure from his gaze which further illuminates Michael’s role in the movie as a heavy presence and as the Godfather.
After the two-shots, the camera pans to watch Michael move to and sit on the couch. Throughout the scene, there are instances where we just see the disdain in Michael’s face and nothing else. These high angled shots make Kay seem unimportant and little compared to Michael. In the next moment, it is edited so that a shot of the children outside playing and laughing juxtaposes the seriousness of the conversation between the two. As the conversation turns into a full blown argument, the camera switches back and forth between Kate and Michael’s faces. Michael’s expression increasingly gets more annoyed and mad until finally Kay confesses that she had an abortion. In Michael’s mind, this is the worst thing that someone could ever do to him. A close up of his face as he realizes what Kay has done makes clear to the viewers just how mad Michael is. After Kay calls their marriage “unholy” and “evil,” the camera pans out to show both of them in one shot for the first time in the whole scene. Right at that moment, Michael slaps Kay and reinforces the fact that she won’t take his children and he’ll do anything to stop her. Overall, the camera techniques emphasize the fact that Michael is the one in charge and no one can stop him.
