Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Il Sorpasso
1962 · Dino Risi · Il Sorpasso on Sightlines
August, and Rome has emptied out. Shutters down, streets bare, light hard enough to make you squint. A man in an open Lancia circles a block, prowling, leaning on a horn that plays a little tune, until a face appears at an upstairs window. It belongs to a law student who was trying to study. An hour later the student is on the coast road beside a stranger, going fast, going nowhere.
The whole film is in that pickup. You just can't hear it yet.
The usual account of Il Sorpasso: satire of the economic miracle, charming monster, cautionary tale. All true, and a little inert. Deleuze gives the film more torque, because he gives a name to the thing Risi actually discovered.
For fifty years cinema ran on a circuit Deleuze called the action-image. A character perceives a situation, the situation presses, they act, and the act changes the situation. Most movies still run this way. After the war it broke, and it broke in Italy first: De Sica's characters walk across a real city all day and fix nothing. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image, and among its symptoms he listed the balade: the trip that transforms nothing. A journey that once meant a quest now just means driving.
Il Sorpasso is the balade with a radio in it.
Watch Bruno with that in mind. Gassman gives him the complete action-hero kit — decisiveness, appetite, reflexes, total confidence about what to do next. What he has no access to is a situation. Nothing presses on him. So the machinery runs on empty, and what it produces is the sorpasso, the overtaking. You get past a car. Then there's another car. The act is executed beautifully and it changes nothing, discloses nothing, and leads only to the next one. Risi found a physical emblem for action that has lost its object, then drove it up the Tyrrhenian coast for a hundred minutes. The multi-tone horn is the same joke in sound: a fanfare announcing an arrival that isn't one.
This is also why the film's clichés aren't lazy. Bruno's entire repertoire is secondhand: the patter, the twist records off the dashboard, Vianello's boom-era optimism on the radio. Deleuze thought one mark of the broken circuit was that characters start living knowingly inside clichés, because clichés are what's left when action stops meaning anything. Gassman plays a man made wholly of them, and plays him as magnificent.
Opposite him sits the other half of the break. Trintignant's Roberto barely acts. He rides, he watches, he judges privately, and most of his inner life arrives as voice-over rather than speech. That's partly a consequence of Italian post-synchronization practice, which dubbed the French actor and pushed his performance into the face and the interior line. Deleuze has a word for this character: the seer, the voyant, the one who can only look. He is the film's true camera position.
And Risi builds his most reliable composition around exactly that. The two men side by side in the open cabin, facing forward, coast streaming past, the camera rigged to ride with them so you feel its presence in the car, watching one man watch another. It's the same shot over and over and it does two jobs. It says they are pointed in the same direction. It says they are not on the same trip. The identical drive is a lark for Bruno and an education for Roberto, a seduction, an apprenticeship in how to live. One act, two situations, no way to settle which is operative. That equivocation runs both the comedy and the ending.
Around them, the spaces stop behaving like settings. Contini shoots the Ferragosto city with a bright, exposed flatness, and the deserted Rome of the opening isn't a backdrop for action so much as a leftover place where action used to happen. Deleuze's term is any-space-whatever: space that has lost its coordinates and now registers only a mood. August does it here for free.
What keeps the film from floating off is that it has a slope. Bruno is a creature of appetite (food, girls, speed, noise, the next stop), and Deleuze's name for a cinema of pure drives running under the social surface is the impulse-image, which always tends downhill. The Lancia is the instrument of that appetite and the measure of it. The gradient is gentle for most of the picture because it's sunny and funny. Then it isn't.
There's an older strand here too. Risi inherits neorealism's method outright: Ladri di biciclette's real streets, real distances, a story built from the patient observation of a journey. Bazin loved that cinema for letting reality stay ambiguous instead of pre-digesting it into drama. Risi keeps the ambiguity and puts it inside a consumer object doing a hundred kilometres an hour, which may be the sharpest thing anyone said about Italy in 1962. From La strada he takes the itinerant two-hander, the episodic road, buoyancy laid over desolation. From I soliti ignoti he takes the commedia all'italiana principle that comedy comes from sharply drawn social types rubbing against each other rather than from gag mechanics. From Divorzio all'italiana he takes permission for the tonal gamble: satire carried by a star's irony, bending toward a mordant reversal. And Gassman was an instrument Risi had already built two years earlier in Il mattatore, the classical tragedian remade as a protean swindler.
What Risi added was the ending, and it's a structural invention rather than a plot trick. Lucidi's cut gives the crash no cushion at all. No slowing, no preparation, no scene afterward to help you. The boy who was only along for the ride is the one who dies. Because the film spent its whole length making you love the drive, four seconds at the end reach backwards and change every earlier laugh. That retroactive reach is the achievement: comedy that revokes its own pleasures, with no sermon to soften the revocation.
It set a form. Risi kept working the vein, Una vita difficile alongside it and I mostri the year after, and the road picture whose journey transforms nothing and whose ending refuses to console became a permanent option for cinema, along with the car, the pop soundtrack and the hard stop.
One thing to carry into a rewatch. Bruno's posture at the wheel — arm out, head back, horn under his thumb — isn't only characterization. Deleuze would call it a gest: a bodily attitude that exposes an entire social relation. That's the economic miracle, sitting down, in a convertible.
So watch Roberto's face instead of Bruno's mouth. The film is happening over there.
Concepts in play
- voyage-balade-form — The picaresque chain of encounters and detours across a single Ferragosto weekend, 'organized as a series of episodes bound by forward motion,' with the film withholding 'any conventional moral payoff or redemption.'
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Bruno's constant decisive action — acceleration, aggressive overtaking, the horn 'bound into Bruno's character' — resolves nothing, while Roberto is 'contained, hesitant, mostly reactive.'
- consciousness-of-cliches — The twist and light-pop soundtrack issuing from the car radio as 'the sonic signature of the era's consumerist optimism' (Vianello's 'Guarda come dondolo'), attached to a man whose 'bonhomie masks selfishness, evasion, and a hollow core.'
- the seer (voyant) — Trintignant's Roberto, whose 'inner life carried by voice-over and by the flicker of judgment and longing across a quiet face' replaces action for most of the film.
- dicisign — The rigging that keeps both actors in frame inside the moving car with the coast streaming past — the camera riding with them, visibly perceiving Roberto in the act of perceiving Bruno.
- index-of-equivocity — The recurring side-by-side two-shot: 'two men pointed in the same direction who understand the trip entirely differently' — one drive belonging to two incompatible situations.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — 'The deserted Rome of the opening, emptied for Ferragosto,' shot by Contini with 'the glare of the August sun and the emptiness of the holiday-abandoned city' in bright, exposed clarity — a city that has stopped being a setting for action.
- impulse-image — Bruno as pure appetite — food, flirtation, speed, noise — with the Lancia Aurelia ('less a prop than a co-star') and its multi-tone horn as the charged instruments of his drives beneath the sunlit social surface.
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — The journey's irreversible downward gradient to the abrupt crash: the 'easy life' Bruno models 'is revealed as reckless and finally lethal,' and the quiet young man who let himself be swept along pays the price.
- the gest — Gassman's 'expansive, physical' performance behind the wheel, with the car's acceleration, overtaking and horn 'bound into Bruno's character' — a driving posture that exposes the whole social relation of the economic miracle.