The Way He Looks · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A hand finds a shoulder. It happens over and over in this film: someone reaches out, settles a palm on Leonardo, and the two of them start walking. The most ordinary gesture available to a body, and Daniel Ribeiro builds an entire romance on it, because the same movement does two unrelated jobs. It is how you guide a blind friend across a street. It is how you touch someone you want. Nobody inside the frame can say which one is happening. Neither can we.

Ribeiro's specific invention, worked out first in his 2010 short and then expanded with the same three actors, was to take the charge that romance normally carries in the exchanged glance and move it into contact. The corollary is a refusal: no blacked-out frames, no smeared focus, no simulation of what Leonardo doesn't see. Pierre de Kerchove's camera stays warm and close and level, on faces and on hands, and Leonardo is fully visible to us throughout. We are never inside his blindness. We are beside it.

Deleuze has a name for what that produces. Borrowing from Peirce, he calls it a dicisign: not the image of a world, but the image of someone perceiving, with the camera's own act of perceiving felt alongside. Ordinarily a dicisign arrives as a pair. A character looks; we cut to what they see. Ribeiro gives us the first shot and permanently withholds the second. The reverse shot isn't delayed for suspense. It doesn't exist. Since we can't borrow Leonardo's senses, we have to read him the way Gabriel and Giovana do, from outside — by watching what his hands are doing and listening for what he's hearing.

This is where Deleuze's Bergson earns its keep. Perception and action are two ends of one circuit, and what makes a creature a subject rather than a billiard ball is the gap between them, the hesitation Deleuze calls the centre of indetermination. In most films that gap is a beat, invisible. Here it's the whole performance. Guilherme Lobo plays Leonardo as someone who receives, waits a fraction, then answers, with no trace of self-pity and none of inspirational uplift. You can watch a self happening in the interval.

Sound does the rest. Deleuze separates the frame from the relative out-of-field, the adjacent space a frame implies, the room next door. For most characters that implied space is a continuity convenience. For Leonardo it's the primary environment, and the sound design treats it that way: ambient texture, the proximity of a voice, the audibility of a small movement. The image stops at the frame line. His world doesn't.

Then the engine. Deleuze splits the action-image into two shapes. The large form is the western: a whole situation presses down until someone acts and changes it. The small form runs backwards, where a modest act discloses a situation we couldn't otherwise see. Its most volatile variant is what he calls the index of equivocity, a single gesture that could belong to two different situations at once, so that the act itself becomes the question. That is this film, scene after scene. A shared shower after a swim. A slow dance at a party. A bike ride where one boy steers and the other holds on. Each is an unremarkable teenage event and each is a declaration, and nothing in the staging will tell you which. Neither boy knows either.

Which is why the lens is worth the trouble rather than being decoration. Even sympathetic critics called the film slight; its largest events are a slap, a sulk, a misread signal. But slightness is a measure of plot, and the tension here isn't in what happens. It's in what a gesture might be. Once you see that every touch is an index pointing at two possible worlds, the film stops looking low-stakes and starts looking almost unbearably suspended.

Late Deleuze turned to a cinema of the body: postures and attitudes that carry time instead of advancing a plot, and the gest, a posture that lays a social relation bare. Being led is a posture. The arm-in-arm walk to school holds a whole arrangement inside it — a mother's fear, a friend's usefulness, a boy's dependence — legible entirely in how two bodies are joined. So the film's arc isn't a change of circumstance. It's a change of posture. The short was called I Don't Want to Go Back Alone. The feature is called Today I Want to Go Back Alone. Same route home, one negation flipped. That's the bildungsroman, and bodies carry it, not events.

There's a Bazinian ethic underneath. Bazin argued that some realities are falsified by being cut apart, and that cinema's realist vocation is to keep a space and its duration intact. Ribeiro's editing is scene-length and unhurried, cutting to preserve continuity of feeling rather than to manufacture suspense. Applied to adolescence that becomes a method: let a scene run long enough for a touch to have time to turn ambiguous.

He didn't invent this alone. The grammar of near-touch comes from Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies, where desire is built from held looks and choreographed almost-contact instead of dialogue. The skin-close framing of faces and hands comes from Blue Is the Warmest Color, released the year before; de Kerchove warms and steadies what Kechiche shot hot and handheld. The observational, low-conflict register and the refusal of tragedy come from Moodysson's Show Me Love. Beautiful Thing set the tonal contract, buoyant pop as a promise that the story won't punish anyone, and the Belle & Sebastian cue is that contract renewed. Haigh's Weekend had already proved that sustained tenderness needs no melodramatic engine. The short is a debt of a stranger kind: Lobo, Audi and Amorim had found the chemistry already, so the feature inherits a relationship instead of building one. Casting continuity as a form of authorship.

Forward, honesty beats genealogy. The record won't support naming films this one caused; its influence is exemplary rather than traceable. What it demonstrated is that a sincere, non-tragic queer teen romance could travel from São Paulo to Berlin and outward — Panorama, the Teddy, FIPRESCI, Brazil's Oscar submission — by exporting gentleness from a national cinema known abroad for urgency and violence. It also validated a route: a queer short finding a global audience online, then making the case for the feature.

The larger claim is about the medium. Film's oldest erotic device is the exchanged look and the shot/reverse-shot built to serve it. This film assembles a complete romance without either and loses nothing, which is a finding about cinema and not only about blindness. The look is one grammar, not the grammar.

Watch it again with your attention on hands. Ask of every touch whether it's help or want. Some are one, some are both, and the film's real tenderness is that its blind protagonist has to answer that question with his palms, in front of everyone. Keep one question open for the end: when he finally does go back alone, what has he agreed to lose?