Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Heaven Can Wait
1943 · Ernst Lubitsch · Heaven Can Wait on Sightlines
5 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 how often a doorway frames the edge of a scene. (staging)
Lubitsch's habitual device is a doorway, and Cronjager lights the depth beyond it, the next room, the hallway, so it stays visible but unexplained.
Payoff: A great deal of the story happens in the space you can see but are never shown directly.
Notice how many big moments the film simply skips over. (cutting)
An elopement is prepared and then it has already happened; a rupture gets repaired somewhere off screen, with dissolves swallowing whole years between scenes.
Payoff: You are constantly handed the after, not the event, and asked to fill in what happened.
Watch a married couple divide a sausage without saying a word. (staging)
The Strabel breakfast plays almost entirely on cutlery and rival newspapers, staged like a duel, and it tells you the whole marriage without a line of dialogue.
Payoff: A whole marriage gets explained through breakfast props instead of a single spoken argument.
Watch how disciplined the color stays until one scarlet dress arrives. (light)
The film keeps its palette dampened, creams and wine reds and mahogany, so that when Martha appears in scarlet at the top of the stairs it registers as an event.
Payoff: One strong color lands harder because the film has kept everything else so restrained around it.
Watch Henry describe his life as worse than it looks. (performance)
Ameche plays him prosecuting himself, foregrounding every transgression while the film quietly keeps showing you the kindness he forgets to mention.
Payoff: You end up knowing more about the case than the man testifying does himself. In the reading: index of equivocity. Deleuze calls this an index of equivocity: the same seventy years reading as both a case for damnation and for decency.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what happens behind each closed door. The film hands you the missing scene to finish yourself.