Anyone but You · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two people stand with their arms around each other for the benefit of a wedding party, and say something unforgivable to each other through their teeth.

That image is the film's engine, and it's a staging problem Will Gluck has to re-solve in nearly every scene. The arm is doing two jobs. It is a prop in a performance the characters have agreed to give, and it is a hand on a waist. Nothing in the shot tells you which.

Deleuze has a name for that, and it's more useful than it sounds. In Cinema 1 he sorts action films by which way they run. The large form starts with a big situation that presses on someone until they act and change it: the western, the epic. The small form runs backwards. You get the act first, and the situation has to be inferred from it. Comedy has always lived here. Deleuze called the revealing gesture an index, and he singled out one variety, the index of equivocity: an act that could belong to two completely different situations, with the film declining to say which.

Fake dating is an industrial-scale equivocity machine. The premise issues a standing alibi for every touch. Bea leans into Ben, the contract says performance, your eyes say otherwise, and neither reading can be ruled out. Much Ado gave Gluck the antagonism. The fake-relationship convention gave him a way to make every affectionate gesture in the picture structurally undecided.

Now watch what that does to the camera, because it explains a choice reviewers filed under "flat." Danny Ruhlmann's photography is bright, high-key, unfussy, built to keep both leads legible in wide and medium two-shots. That's the requirement, not the ceiling. A close-up would settle the question. Deleuze's term for the close-up is the affection-image, a feeling registered on a face before it discharges into action, and it is precisely what this film has to ration. Cut to Bea alone at the wrong moment and you've handed the audience the answer. The two-shot is the only frame in which the gesture stays open. The postcard Sydney light isn't laziness. It keeps two bodies simultaneously readable, which is the entire job.

The other machine is four hundred years old. Deleuze's third category, thirdness, covers images whose meaning lives in a relation the viewer holds rather than in anything visible. He calls it the relation-image, and he built it out of Hitchcock, where we always know one thing more than the characters do. Shakespeare got there first, in the gulling scenes: friends stage a conversation for Benedick to overhear, and he believes it. Nothing in it is false. Words are said, a body hears them. What does the work is a habit Deleuze called the mark, an act that means something because of the customary chain it sits in. Overheard speech is the strongest mark we have, because we assume speech not addressed to us is unperformed. Fake the address and the chain delivers a lie carrying the full weight of truth.

Here is Gluck's actual invention, and it's structural rather than stylistic. In Much Ado, the deception runs one way: third parties gull the couple. In the fake-dating convention it runs the other: the couple gulls everyone else. Gluck runs both at once. Bea and Ben are lying to the wedding party while the wedding party lies to them. Every scene carries two undecidable layers, and the audience holds both. That's why the film needs a destination wedding rather than an office or a city. It needs a closed population where everyone can be deceiving and deceived at the same time.

The parts are borrowed and the debts are specific. Branagh's 1993 Much Ado About Nothing supplies the gulling machinery intact, overheard misdirection and all. His Girl Friday supplies the overlapping fire between two combative equals; Deleuze calls that a binomial, force against force, except that neither one is the villain, so nobody wins and the war becomes the relationship. The Awful Truth supplies the load-bearing premise, hostility as a mask over desire, which is what lets antagonism read as evidence. It Happened One Night supplies forced proximity, the Walls of Jericho reborn as a wedding neither of them can leave. Bringing Up Baby supplies the escalating physical mishap in which the woman dismantles the man's composure, which is what Tia Nolan's cutting is really timing. And 10 Things I Hate About You supplies the delivery system: Shakespeare run through pop-scored studio gloss for a young audience.

One more concept arrives here by accident. Deleuze took the gest from Brecht: a posture that makes a social relation visible as a posture. He usually found it in slow, difficult cinema. It shows up in a Sony rom-com because the premise forces it. To fake a couple, Bea and Ben have to manufacture the signs of one, consciously: where the hand goes, how long a look holds, what a shared joke looks like from across a lawn. For a good stretch of the film, romance is on display as a set of learned public gestures with nameable parts. Then the genre takes it back. The resolution comes when the performance collapses into sincerity, the signs stop being signs, and the circuit closes. That's the movement-image doing its job. Perceive, act, and the situation changes for good.

Deleuze's third relation-term is the symbol, an object that condenses a film's organizing relation. "Unwritten" is almost too neat: a song about a story not yet written, recurring across an arc about two people refusing to admit a story has started. Then it did something films rarely manage. The symbol left the movie, went to TikTok, and sold the tickets.

Which is where the honest claim about significance sits. This film's importance is industrial. Twenty-five million dollars, soft reviews, a quiet opening, then two hundred million worldwide off word of mouth, in a decade when the theatrical rom-com had been more or less deported to streaming.

But there's a sting in it for theory. Deleuze's two volumes tell the story of the action-image losing its grip: after the war, characters stop being able to act on what they perceive, and cinema learns to make images of time instead. One symptom he tracked was a rising consciousness of clichés, films and characters aware of moving through worn conventions and half-paralyzed by the awareness. Anyone but You is the counter-case. It puts its source text on screen in quoted lines. It shows you the machinery. Then it runs the machinery, and the machinery works, in a room full of strangers, for two hours. Knowing the trick and being taken by it turn out to be compatible. That is not a small thing to have re-demonstrated at scale.

So watch it again for framing. Notice how long Gluck holds both of them in the shot before he lets you have a face by itself. Then try to find the moment you lost the ability to tell whether a gesture was performed or meant, and ask whether Bea and Ben lost it earlier than you did, or later. The small form's oldest trick is that it makes you do the inferring. You supply the situation from the gesture. The film is betting you've done that before, off-screen, and got it wrong.