Girls Like Girls · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the thing the film keeps: a girl, seventeen, in a house her mother has just left forever. Rural Oregon outside the window, summer coming on, and Coley moving through rooms that used to mean someone. Then Sonya. And here the story does something quietly radical against its own origin — it refuses to resolve.

Because there was an earlier version. Hayley Kiyoko's 2015 music video told this same romance in four minutes and ended it with a fight: a boyfriend, a betrayal, a fist. Desire got settled by action, the way a pop song needs it settled. The 2026 feature throws the punch away. It keeps the two girls and removes the enemy you can hit. What blocks Coley and Sonya now is not a person but a hesitation — self-doubt, unfamiliarity, grief that hasn't finished. Deleuze has a precise name for exactly this move, and it is the hinge of his whole account of cinema: the crisis of the action-image. In classical film a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; perception loops into action and the loop drives the plot. The crisis is the moment that loop slackens — when someone can see her situation with total clarity and still cannot act on it. That is the entire drama here. Coley knows what she feels. Knowing changes nothing. The film's engine, as the dossier puts it, is 'self-doubt delaying connection,' and delay is the crisis made into a form.

So what fills a film once you drain the action out of it? Looking. Deleuze calls the figure who replaces the agent the seer — a watcher and endurer rather than a doer, stranded in what he names pure optical and sound situations, opsigns, where a character (and we with her) can only take in what's there. Grief has already made Coley a seer before Sonya arrives; the dossier reads her condition as 'watchfulness, the sense of being unseen.' The feature's whole inherited grammar serves this. Kiyoko's video worked in gold and skin and water, organized around glances and nearness instead of spectacle, and a faithful expansion of it would keep the camera close, shallow, patient on a face that is feeling something it has not yet been able to say.

That face is the second concept, and it is the one the old coarse tag already half-saw. The affection-image, for Deleuze, is the close-up: a feeling registered but not discharged into action. Its purest form is the qualisign, an almost immobile face holding a single quality — wonder, contemplation, ache. This is the exact debt the film owes Moonlight (2016), which built queer interiority out of the near-motionless close-up held past comfort. Watch for the shot that stays on Coley after the line of dialogue is over. Nothing happens in it. It is the plot.

The third concept turns the look into a circuit. When two people watch each other watching, Deleuze's term is the dicisign — the camera perceives a character who is herself perceiving, and we feel the doubling. This is the craft that Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) codified for every sapphic romance that followed: shot answering reverse-shot as reciprocal authorship, each woman the maker of the other's image, the look no longer one-directional. And it is why the film's slowness deserves to be read as substance rather than deficiency. A film of missed connection could be merely thin. Under this lens the withheld gesture is the content — the interval where perceiving and acting come apart is precisely where the feeling lives. Editorially that interval is dead time, temps mort: stretches the dossier rightly calls the film's central problem, sustaining proximity and hesitation across a whole feature 'without the compression a music video enjoys.'

Place it, then, in a lineage that is unusually legible. Carol (2015) taught it desire-through-obstruction — longing carried by reflections and glass and the charged look across constraint rather than by declaration. Call Me by Your Name (2017) gave it season-as-sensorium, summer heat and water as the register that does the erotic work the characters won't yet do out loud. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018) supplied the rural, non-punitive frame in which queer teenage desire is not pathologized by the film's own eye. Love, Simon (2018) lent the accessible pop-bright surface. Each is a specific craft debt, and together they name a fact Deleuze insists on: film is a discourse, and a film is a chapter answering earlier chapters.

The significance is the neatest part, and it is true rather than invented. This story exists three times over — video, novel, feature — and across those iterations a single property migrates from the action-image to the time-image before our eyes. First told as a fight that resolves; then, a decade later, told as a look that endures. Kiyoko's real invention is not a new image but a conversion of her own: she took a thing she had already made as action and remade it as time, moving the whole drama inward, from the blow to the interval before it.

So rewatch it for the shots where nothing advances. The pause on the face, the held exchange of glances, the summer afternoon that refuses to become an event. That is not the film failing to get to the point. That is the point — a romance that learned to trust what happens when action stops and someone, at last, is only allowed to feel.