Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Philomena

2013 · Stephen Frears · Philomena on Sightlines

There's a shot Frears keeps coming back to and never underlines. Philomena in profile. In a car. On a plane. At a window. The camera is still, or it pushes in so slightly that you register the move only afterwards. Robbie Ryan shoots it the way you'd shoot someone you didn't want to disturb. Stack those shots up across the film and you get a portrait of a woman being carried along by other people's momentum.

That's the film's actual proposition, and it isn't the one the marketing made. Philomena Lee is driven, flown, checked into hotels, walked across wet ground and asked questions, for the length of a feature, in pursuit of something that was over before she began. Anthony died of an AIDS-related illness before she got near him.

Deleuze's two cinema books turn on a single break, and it's worth stating plainly because everything else follows from it. In most films — he calls this the movement-image — a person perceives a situation and acts to change it. Perception feeds action, action alters the situation, and the cutting exists to keep that circuit turning. Then something happens to cinema after the war and you start getting films where the circuit won't close. The character sees, and can do nothing with what they've seen. Deleuze's word for that person is voyant: a seer. Not an agent. A witness who has to go on living inside the thing witnessed.

Philomena Lee is one of the great late examples, and almost nobody says so, because the film is wearing a road comedy.

Watch how carefully the capacity to act is distributed. Sixsmith gets all of it. He's a former government spin doctor, a professional causer of effects, a man whose entire training is in making information do things to the world. Oxbridge, impatient, allergic to religion. He has a laptop, contacts, a commission. And none of it is any use for the only question that matters. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: characters who perceive perfectly well and can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Sixsmith's competence is the joke, and the joke is load-bearing.

The purest case is an image on a screen. The search turns up video of Anthony as an adult. Philomena can look at him. That is the whole transaction. Deleuze's term for this is a pure optical situation, an opsign: an image that offers itself to be seen and gives you nothing to do about it. The film has been arranging it from the start, through Sixsmith's world of email and Google and telephone calls, the record searches, the database of names. The archive is how they find Anthony. The archive is also why finding him changes nothing.

Which produces the sharpest irony in the film, and one only available after search engines: the truth sits in public the entire time, in images and documents anyone could have pulled up, while the abbey maintains that its paper records burned in a fire. The convent's power was never in keeping a secret. It was in the confidence that nobody would read. Deleuze has a name for images that stop being self-evident and start asking to be deciphered — lectosigns, readable images. This film is full of them. A photograph. A list of names. A face on a monitor. None behaves the way evidence behaves in a thriller, where a discovery triggers the next move. They behave like things you have to sit with.

And they turn up nowhere in particular. Ryan splits the palette along the geography: Ireland cool and gray-green and weather-bound, convent exteriors, ruined outbuildings, a graveyard; America warm and blank, hotel corridors, airport lounges, the beige of suburban Washington. Deleuze took the phrase espace quelconque, any-space-whatever, for spaces that have stopped functioning as settings for action and become pure affect, disconnected, deserted of purpose. That's the American half exactly, and it works because it's also an argument. The placelessness is where the child went. A boy is removed from a specific muddy named place in Tipperary and delivered into anonymity, and you feel it as a change in colour temperature.

The Irish ground does the opposite job. The records burned, so the site has to carry what paper no longer does: an emptied landscape holding a past that can't be talked out of it. Deleuze, thinking about Straub and Huillet, called this the stratigraphic image — you read the ground the way you'd read strata. Frears doesn't dramatise it. He shoots it plainly and lets the weather do the arguing.

The 1950s arrive as fragments. Brighter, more particulate, closer to a home movie than to period reconstruction, never developed into a parallel narrative. That approach solved a budget problem, since full period sequences would have capsized a film this size. It also solved a formal one, and Frears had solved it before: Prick Up Your Ears runs the same way, a biographer in the present with the past cutting in unsignposted. Deleuze would call these recollection-images, dated flashbacks of a former present. What's odd is how they behave. Normally a recollection-image gets retrieved, does its explanatory work, and hands the character back to the action. These intrude. They arrive the way recollection actually arrives, uninvited and out of scale, and they hand her back nothing.

The most brutal of them is composed rather than performed. The film quotes The Magdalene Sisters directly in its power geometry: the nun framed frontally behind a desk, the girl standing. Frears reproduces the blocking, pulls the camera further back, keeps the score chamber-quiet. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. Not acting. Arrangement. Who sits, who stands, where the desk is. And when Anthony is driven away there is no reaction close-up cued for weeping. That restraint isn't squeamishness, it's the grammar of the British television play Frears trained in, Cathy Come Home above all, where the state removing a child is staged as flat unemphatic procedure and the authority figures are shot at working distance instead of as villains. The film declines to perform the grief. You have to bring it.

Which leaves the face, and that's where Ryan's real work is. Dench is lit generously and not flatteringly, lit so that she reads. The film's most important information is the micro-movement of an old woman's face while she decides how much to say. Deleuze distinguishes a face holding one quality, immobile, from a face where tiny movements accumulate toward a threshold. The second he calls a potisign, an icon of power, and it is this film's basic unit. She has spent sixty years managing disclosure. Every scene is calibrated against how much she will let out.

Then she forgives the nuns, and Sixsmith can't.

Everything in the construction invites you to read that as capitulation, and it isn't. In Deleuze's terms it's the only genuine act in the film, precisely because it doesn't function as an action. Nothing about the situation changes. The boy is still dead, the records are still ash, the institution goes unpunished. What changes is her relation to it. Frears hands the single power of decision to the person he has photographed for two hours as a passenger, withholds it from the man with the laptop, and does it without a speech.

So what did this do to film? Not a revolution in form. Frears has distrusted display for forty years. Its contribution is a demonstration, and a useful one: the seer, a protagonist who can only watch, was supposed to belong to difficult cinema. Philomena installs that structure inside the most legible commercial shape available, and inherits it honestly — It Happened One Night's cynical newspaperman travelling with a woman he first regards as copy, the moral turn located at the moment he stops filing and starts protecting; Rain Man's rhythm of comic irritation punctuated by one withheld institutional fact that reframes what you've already laughed at. What Frears changes is the destination. In those films the trip transforms. Deleuze's name for the postwar version is the balade, the journey that transforms nothing, and that's this one. It discloses, and there is nothing to be done with what it discloses.

The mechanism is the two-shot. Ryan keeps Dench and Coogan in the same frame, medium and medium-close, so the comedy and the atrocity occupy one continuous space. No cut is needed to change register, which means no cut announces the change. The Snapper gave Frears the licence, his own Irish film about an unmarried pregnancy played as warm comedy without softening the coercion. This film extends it much further: a joke about a romance novel minutes after the sale of a child, and neither one cancels the other.

It didn't seed a school. It seeded something else. Philomena Lee appeared in the publicity beside Dench and Coogan, the campaign folded openly into advocacy, and the family founded the Philomena Project to force access to Ireland's adoption records. Deleuze called this fabulation: a subject never granted a voice caught in the act of telling their own story, and in the telling bringing into existence a people who weren't previously a political fact. The women of the mother-and-baby homes were missing in the strongest sense of the word. Then one of them went on television with a film star.

Watch it again for the profile shots. Count them. Then watch her face through the last twenty minutes and notice that you can read it, because Ryan made certain you could.

Concepts in play

the seer (voyant) — The film's one recurring formal gesture: the profile shot of Philomena in transit — in a car, on a plane, at a window — accumulating into a portrait of a woman carried along by other people's momentum, in pursuit of a son who died before she could reach him.
crisis of the action-image — Sixsmith, a disgraced Labour spin doctor whose professional world is email, Google and the telephone, brings a full apparatus of investigative competence to a situation none of it can alter; his prosecutorial energy is structurally useless.
pure optical & sound situations (opsigns) — The internet video of Anthony as an adult: an image Philomena can only watch, discovered through the same digital archive that is powerless to return him.
the voyage / balade form — The Ireland-to-Washington search inherits the mismatched-pair road structure of It Happened One Night and Rain Man, but the travel is mostly ellipsis and transforms nothing: the object of the journey is already dead and buried in the record.
the readable image (lectosign) — The film's 'sharpest structural irony' — the truth sitting in plain sight in publicly available images and documents, while the abbey claims its paper records were destroyed by fire; discovery proceeds by record searches and a database of names rather than by action.
any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The American sequences' anonymous beige — hotel corridors, airport lounges, suburban Washington — explicitly registered as 'the placelessness into which the child disappeared.'
the stratigraphic / archaeological image — The cool, desaturated gray-green Irish material — convent exteriors, the graveyard, the ruined outbuildings — carrying a past whose paper records the abbey says burned, with the camera held still and the score chamber-quiet.
recollection-image (image-souvenir) — The 1950s Roscrea material glimpsed in short fragments rather than developed as a parallel narrative, brighter and more particulate, 'closer to memory or home movie than to dramatic reconstruction' — intrusive recollection rather than exposition.
the gest — The institutional power geometry quoted from The Magdalene Sisters: the nun framed frontally behind a desk with the girl standing, Frears reproducing the blocking but keeping the camera further back — the arrangement of bodies making the accusation the dialogue doesn't.
potisign (icon of power) — Ryan lights Dench 'not flatteringly, but legibly,' so that the film's most important information — the micro-movements of an old woman's face as she decides how much to reveal — is always readable.
fabulation (legending) — Philomena Lee participated in the film's publicity alongside Dench and Coogan, the campaign folded deliberately into advocacy, and the family founded the Philomena Project to press for access to Irish adoption records.
the people are missing — The film became one of the more visible cultural interventions in the ongoing Irish reckoning with the Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes — a constituency whose records were destroyed and who had to be constituted as a public.

How Philomena was received →