Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Anyone but You
2023 · Will Gluck · Anyone but You on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch where their hands go while they insult each other. (staging)
Bea and Ben hold each other for the benefit of the wedding party and say unforgivable things through their teeth. The arm is a prop in an agreed performance and a hand on a waist at the same time.
Payoff: The fake-relationship premise issues an alibi for every touch, so no gesture in the film can be settled either way. In the reading: index-of-equivocity. The reading calls each touch an index of equivocity: an act that could belong to two different situations, with the film declining to say which.
Count how long both leads stay in one shot together. (camera)
Danny Ruhlmann keeps them legible in wide and medium two-shots and holds off on isolating either face. The framing stays open where a close-up would close the question.
Payoff: A face alone would tell you what someone actually feels. The two-shot is the only frame that keeps the gesture undecided.
Listen for conversations one of them is meant to overhear. (structure)
Friends stage talk for a combatant to catch by accident, straight out of Much Ado About Nothing, which the film quotes on screen. Nothing said is false. The address is the lie.
Payoff: You know more than either of them in almost every scene, and the comedy runs on that gap. In the reading: the mental-image. The reading calls this a relation-image: the meaning lives in a connection the viewer holds rather than in anything visible on screen.
Notice how bright and even the Sydney light is. (light)
Harbor, water, sun and architecture shot as postcard spectacle, with everything high key and unfussy. Nothing is expressive and nothing is in shadow. The look is the standard of the destination romance.
Payoff: The clarity is the requirement. Two bodies have to stay readable at all times for the comedy to work.
Listen for the same 2004 pop song coming back. (sound)
Natasha Bedingfield's Unwritten recurs across the film, sometimes played in the scene, sometimes over it, tied to where Bea and Ben stand with each other. Este Haim and Chris Stracey handle the rest of the score.
Payoff: A song about a story not yet written rides an arc about two people denying a story has started. It later left the film and sold the tickets. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the song a symbol: one object condensing the whole relation the film is organized around.
Once you have seen it
Track who is lying to whom in each scene. (structure)
The couple deceives the wedding party while the wedding party deceives the couple. Gluck runs both directions at once, which Shakespeare and the fake-dating convention each only run one way.
Payoff: Every scene carries two undecidable layers, and you are the only person holding both of them.
Notice how fast the first date turns into hostility. (cutting)
Tia Nolan builds the film around that whiplash and then keeps alternating humiliation and tenderness at a steady clip through the wedding-party subplots. The cutting is invisible and entirely about timing.
Payoff: Nothing here is a montage signature. The rhythm of the jokes is the only style the film needs.
Watch which of them ends up humiliated in each set piece. (performance)
Sweeney plays Bea guarded and impulsive by turns. Powell plays Ben in a light, self-deprecating leading-man register and takes most of the physical punishment. Both commit to looking ridiculous.
Payoff: The screwball rule holds. Composure has to be dismantled before affection is allowed to be admitted.
Notice that nobody can leave the wedding. (setting)
A destination wedding supplies a sealed population of relatives, exes and meddlers, and no exit for several days. The film needs that container rather than a city or an office.
Payoff: A closed group is the only place where everyone can be deceiving and deceived at once, which is what the double plot requires.
Carry this in: Watch where the hands go. Every touch here has an alibi, and neither of them can prove which it was.