Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Strange Ones
1950 · Jean-Pierre Melville · The Strange Ones on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 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 the camera move through the clutter of the Room. (camera)
Decaë shoots the shared bedroom in deep focus, threading the camera through accumulated objects rather than surveying a clean, tidy set.
Payoff: The room feels less like a set than like a mind you are moving through.
Notice how often the film returns to the same room. (structure)
Wherever a scene wanders, the editing keeps pulling the story back to the bedroom, scene after scene, like a coin settling into the same groove.
Payoff: The Room works as a gravitational center that the rest of the world can barely compete with. In the reading: the perfect/saturated crystal. Deleuze calls a sealed, mirror-saturated world with no outside a perfected crystal, and the Room works exactly that way.
Listen for Baroque concerto music over scenes of squalor. (sound)
Cocteau narrates the film in his own voice, and the score draws on grand, ordered Baroque concertos that play against the mess and cruelty of the story rather than matching it.
Payoff: The mismatch between elegant music and ugly behavior is doing ironic work the dialogue never states.
Watch Paul and Elisabeth perform for each other, not just talk. (staging)
The siblings stage their arguments and reconciliations like small productions, with poses, entrances, and declarations rather than the loose behavior of an ordinary conversation.
Payoff: Their whole relationship runs as theater, performed for an audience of exactly one other person.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how the children play. Everything in the Room is staged for an audience of two.