How does Brian De Palma reveal character, advance the plot and establish subtext through the one or more mise en scene in Carlito's Way?

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How does Brian De Palma reveal character, advance the plot and establish subtext through the one or more mise en scene in Carlito’s Way?

Al pacino’s Carlito’s emanates as a common example of a protagonist clinging to their dreams yet drifting within shadows of their former selves. Character’s who are world-weary and set on retirement yet hell bent on “one last job’ or a long due desire for absolution. They come as troubled souls unable to define a new  existence, yet driven by a goals to realise it. In Carlito’s case renting ford pinto’s in the Bahamas. However the film hinges on the protagonists constant struggles to what hinders such dreams, most typically shadowy figures and past deeds emerging from the past to return and haunt them. Although the protagonists are reluctant heroes, they are not weak or negative figures living under the maxim of no heroes amongst thieves, they are “The strongest figures of assertion the cinema has ever produced, because they reverse, "the striving from this world to the other into a striving from another world to this one”

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Carlito’s sees himself in a new light, consequently neglecting his former self and striving to become who now he wants to be, as he exaggeratedly professes in a courtroom judge as a closing statement to an appeal,

We do not sympathise with Carlito and it is obviously doubtable to believe him judging by his exaggeration, however the film subsequently presents us the sincerity of such a declaration.

Carlito’s chooses not to get involved and questions his young cousin Guajiro’s

choice of a lifestyle, evidently mastered by him judging by the following sequence. Carlito’s alter ego Benny Blanco from ...

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