Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Girls Like Girls
2026 · Hayley Kiyoko · Girls Like Girls on Sightlines
Watch the edges of the frame. For much of Girls Like Girls almost nothing in the image is sharp. Gold light pools at the edges and the background melts into peach and lime, and what stays in focus is a narrow sliver: a face, a hand, the space between two girls. Sonja Tsypin, the cinematographer, built the film this way on purpose. She aimed the shallow focus at what she called a point of hyper-fixation, the tiny field of attention of a seventeen-year-old who can't yet let herself look at the whole picture. As Coley comes to understand herself, the depth of field opens. The background comes back. You can watch the lens come out before she does.
That is the film's real invention, and it's the best way into what Gilles Deleuze can offer it. Deleuze spent two books asking what kinds of images cinema makes. One of his starting points, taken from the philosopher Henri Bergson, is easy to grasp. A living creature takes in the world and reacts to it, and between the two there is a gap. Bergson called it an interval. A stone doesn't hesitate when it's struck. An animal does, briefly. A person can stay in that gap for a whole summer. Deleuze calls the being who hesitates a center of indetermination, and what fills the gap is feeling: something registered but not yet acted on.
Coley is that kind of center, and the plot is her interval. The engine of the story is simple. Self-doubt delays connection. Sonya, who has never dated a girl, is unsure too. The film's real question isn't whether these two will get together. It asks how long they can stay at the threshold, and what that suspended time feels like from inside. The editors, Christine Armstrong and Sabine Hoffman, treat it as a problem of rhythm. They cut between bursts of music-video lyricism and long, quiet stretches, and critics noticed how much weight the silences between songs carry. The hesitation isn't something to get through on the way to the plot. It is the plot.
Deleuze's name for the image that lives in that gap is the affection-image. His standard example is the close-up of a face, which takes a feeling out of the flow of action and holds it up to be looked at. Kiyoko's grammar, carried over from her 2015 music video, is built from exactly this: glances, closeness, bodies attended to more than events. Here the lineage matters. From Moonlight the film takes the long, nearly still close-up as a way of showing queer inner life. From Portrait of a Lady on Fire it takes a way of shooting looks between women as a two-way exchange, both women watching and both being watched, rather than the one-way gaze film theory spent decades criticizing. And from Carol it takes the idea that desire shows most clearly when something blocks it. The glance that can't turn into a gesture. Each of these films is an affection-image machine. Kiyoko inherits the machine and adds her own part, which is the focus pull timed to self-knowledge.
The second part is color, and here a finer Deleuzian idea fits closely. He describes a color-image, where a color stops decorating the scene and takes it over, so that the feeling sits in the hue itself. Tsypin and production designer Lindsey Moran worked with off-wheel colors like periwinkle and salmon, and they planned a palette that moves across the film from warm gold, peach and lime toward jewel tones, cyan and a muted steel blue as Coley's story darkens. The vintage Canon K35 lenses from the 1970s add softness and flare in the camera. So the warmth isn't a filter laid over the summer. It's how the summer feels, and when it cools, the cooling is the drama. A palette keyed to inner state is affect on a large scale, a close-up of a mood spread across a whole landscape.
The houses work the same way. Sonya lives in a peach dreamworld crowded with trinkets and dance mementos. Coley's home is bare, shaped by absence: her mother's, and in a sense her own. The grief and the desire in this film aren't two plots. They're two rooms, and the camera carries the feeling from one to the other.
It's worth being honest about what kind of film this is. Deleuze split cinema into two broad regimes. In the movement-image, characters perceive a situation and act to resolve it. In the later time-image, action fails, and characters can only watch and endure. Girls Like Girls belongs to the first. The girls do learn to embrace what they feel. Critics admired its sincerity and craft more than any formal novelty, and that's fair. But a movement-image film can still put almost all its energy into the interval, and this one does. Its action is a single act, the one Coley keeps not doing.
The other ancestors explain the setting. Call Me by Your Name taught queer cinema to use summer itself, heat and water and sun, as the language of first love. The Miseducation of Cameron Post showed rural, small-town queer adolescence without a frame that punishes the desire. Love, Simon proved there was a wide young audience for a warm, pop-scored version. Kiyoko's references through Tsypin (Dhont's Close, Zagar's We the Animals, Andrea Arnold's American Honey) pull the gloss back toward tactile, light-drunk art cinema. The setting is 2006, before social media, when intimacy had to happen in person and in secret. That gives the interval a historical basis. There's no feed to hide behind, only the next look.
It's too early to say what the film will seed. One thing is already unusual. Kiyoko said making mood boards was hard because so few images of this story existed, so the production was partly inventing a visual archive of rural sapphic adolescence in the 2000s instead of quoting one. And the soundtrack holds something stranger: a vocal sample Kiyoko recorded in 2006, the year the story is set. The voice of the real teenager runs underneath the fictional one. You can treat that as a curiosity, or ask what it means for a film about hesitation to carry a past self inside its sound.
So on a rewatch, don't follow the story. Follow the focus. Notice when the background returns, when gold turns to steel, when the music stops and two faces have to hold the silence on their own. That gap between feeling and acting is where the film lives, and Deleuze gives you a name for it.
Concepts in play
- the interval / centre of indetermination — The narrative engine is self-doubt delaying connection. Coley (and the inexperienced Sonya) live in the gap between perceiving and acting, and the cut alternates lyrical bursts with held, quiet duration.
- affection-image — A grammar inherited from Kiyoko's 2015 video, built from glances, physical proximity and close, body-attentive framing. Shallow focus isolates faces and gestures, so feeling is held instead of released into action. The film also descends from Moonlight's near-motionless close-up.
- affective colour — Tsypin and Moran's off-wheel palette (periwinkle, salmon) moves from warm gold, peach and lime toward jewel tones, cyan and muted steel blue as Coley's arc darkens. Colour is keyed to inner state, not period decoration, with the warmth built in the camera through vintage Canon K35 lenses.
- the movement-image — A sensory-motor romance that resolves: the girls learn to embrace their feelings. Continuity serves the arc, and the film's intensity sits in the affective interval, not in any break with action.