Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Like Father, Like Son
2013 · Hirokazu Kore-eda · Like Father, Like Son on Sightlines
The camera is a cheap compact, and the man scrolling through it is an architect who builds glass apartments for other people to live in. Every picture on it is of him. His son took them, over months, in the hours when Ryota wasn't looking, which turns out to be most of the hours there were. Nothing in the plot moves here. It is the moment the film arrives.
Around that moment sits the oldest engine in melodrama: two babies switched at birth, two families, a decision to be made. Kore-eda assembles the engine and then declines to let it drive. The hospital's news lands early and flatly, the way a diagnosis lands. What follows isn't a custody fight. It's two households studying each other across a class gap: the architect's tower with its scheduled piano practice, and the scruffy appliance shop where the other father repairs strangers' broken toys and climbs into the bath with his kids.
Deleuze had a name for what happens to a man like Ryota. He called it the crisis of the action-image. For cinema's first half-century the basic circuit was simple and enormously productive: a character perceives a situation, acts to change it, and the situation changes, with the cutting there to keep the chain tight. Ryota is that circuit in a good suit. He is a solver. Told that his son is not his son, he researches, consults, negotiates, and finally proposes to buy the problem outright by taking both boys. Every move is rational. None of them touch anything. The film is not about a man making the wrong decision. It is about a man discovering that his one competence, the ability to act on a situation, has no purchase on this one.
That is the case for reading the film through Deleuze rather than through its theme. Ask only whether fatherhood is blood or accumulated hours and you get a well-mannered problem play. Ask what has happened to the sensory-motor circuit and the film's manners turn out to be its content: Kore-eda withdraws action from his storytelling at exactly the rate his protagonist loses access to it. The restraint isn't decorum. It's the argument, performed.
When action drops out, what's left is looking. Deleuze's term for such moments is the optical situation, an image that arrives with no motor response attached, so the character becomes a seer instead of a doer. The photographs are the purest one in the film. Ryota can't act on them, answer them, or give them back. He can only take in the fact that he has been the subject of someone's patient attention for years without noticing. Deleuze, following Bergson, separates habitual recognition (you see the thing, you know what to do with it) from attentive recognition, which stalls, circles the object, and starts reaching into the past instead of into movement. Ryota knows what a son is. He does not recognise this son's love until it comes back to him as an image made by someone else's hand.
Almost everything else the film knows, it knows through bodies. Deleuze took a word from Brecht for this: the gest, a posture that makes a social relation visible without anyone stating it. How a man holds a camera is a gest. So is a father in the bathtub with his children, a father timing an exercise on the metronome, a man who mends other people's toys for a living sitting down to mend one of his own. Kore-eda doesn't write the class argument into dialogue. He distributes it across gestures and lets you total them up. This is what Deleuze meant by a cinema of the body: the everyday body carrying duration, the attitude holding more than a line of dialogue could.
None of that grammar came from nowhere, and Kore-eda has never pretended otherwise. The tatami-height static camera and the pillow shots between scenes come from Tokyo Story, where a family's rupture registers in how bodies sit in a room rather than in anything anyone says about it. Those held, unproductive stretches have a name in Deleuze: dead time, the everyday kept on screen past its usefulness to the plot, until duration itself is the thing you're watching. From Late Spring comes the deeper habit, the strongest feeling displaced onto an ordinary object or a piece of admin: a peeled fruit, a packed bag. Here it is the logistics of the swap, the timetables and the trial weekends, standing in for what neither father can say. Deleuze calls a gesture like that an index of lack, a small visible act pointing at a large situation the film won't show you directly. There Was a Father supplies the fault line itself, Ozu's dutiful parent who measures paternity in provision and sacrifice; Ryota is that man with a firm behind him. Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs models the refusal to let money erupt, so that class pressure grinds through composed everyday scenes instead of exploding in one. And behind all of it stands Bicycle Thieves, where Deleuze located the break: a father and son walking a real city, a moral problem no action can solve, a non-professional child whose presence can't be faked. Bazin praised that film for refusing to force its meaning through montage. Deleuze pushed past him. The point was never more realism. It was that the character had become a viewer of his own life.
The method has a source too. Kore-eda points at Ken Loach rather than Ozu, and Kes is why: shoot in sequence, withhold the full script, let the child meet each event as an event. That is a production technique with a formal consequence. An actor who doesn't know what's coming cannot play toward an outcome; he can only be present. The performances feel overheard because they were. The sensory-motor arc was removed at the level of the shoot, not just the cut, and that is Kore-eda's specific invention here.
What it did to narrative is easy to state and was hard to do. The switched-babies plot exists to produce a decision scene. Kore-eda moves the turn out of confrontation and into an object: a camera, and the pictures a child made with it while nobody was watching. The rich father buys cameras and records milestones; the boy uses one to look at his father. That gadget condenses the whole film, and no argument between the two households could have said what those frames say.
It took the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2013 and travelled, which mattered. It re-established the quiet Japanese domestic register as a living international form rather than a heritage one, and it set the template Kore-eda carried to the Palme d'Or with Shoplifters five years later, where the family you assemble outranks the one you were assigned. There is a joke in the aftermath the film would appreciate: Spielberg, presiding over the jury that gave it the prize, promptly optioned the remake. A film about a man who believes you can acquire what can only be accumulated was, within days, acquired.
Watch it again for the hands. Who carries a child and how, who kneels, who stays standing, who is holding the camera and who is in front of it. The film never settles whether fatherhood is blood or hours, and it isn't being coy about that. The question it actually leaves open is whether a man organised entirely around acting can learn the harder thing, which is to be in the room for the length of an afternoon with nothing to solve. Kore-eda doesn't tell you. He just holds the shot long enough for you to watch it happen, or not.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Ryota, the problem-solving Tokyo architect, meets the switch with research, negotiation and finally an offer to take both boys; every move is competent and none of them alters the situation.
- pure optical & sound situations — The camera full of photographs the child took of his father while nobody was watching: an image with no action attached to it, which Ryota can only absorb.
- the seer (voyant) — The film's decisive turn has the father reduced from decision-maker to watcher, reading his own life back off a cheap gadget instead of confronting anyone.
- the two recognitions — Ryota knows what a son is, but does not recognise this son's years of attention until it returns to him as an image made by someone else's hand — recognition stalling and reaching backwards instead of into action.
- the gest — The question of fatherhood posed through posture: how a man holds a camera, the shopkeeper sharing the bathtub with his kids against the architect timing piano drills — class made legible as attitude, never stated in dialogue.
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — Fatherhood carried by bodily routine — repairing strangers' toys, shared baths, scheduled practice — with the children's performances shot in sequence and scriptless so they register as present rather than staged.
- dead time (temps mort) — The tatami-level static camera and pillow-shot ellipses inherited from Tokyo Story, holding the everyday past its use to the plot.
- index of lack — Late Spring's displacement of feeling onto ordinary object and errand: the fathers can only express love through the logistics of the swap, timetables and trial weekends standing in for the unsayable.
- symbol (the condensing object) — The camera — the wealthy father's instrument for recording milestones, the child's instrument for looking at his father — is the object in which the film's whole relation is concentrated.