Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Law of Desire
1987 · Pedro Almodóvar · Law of Desire on Sightlines
4 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 saturated and red the color gets indoors. (light)
Fernández shoots in hard, bright, poster-flat color, especially red, rather than the soft diffusion a Hollywood melodrama would use to cushion emotion.
Payoff: The color carries the feeling of a scene directly, out in the open, instead of hiding it in shadow. In the reading: affective colour. The reading calls this the color-image: color that absorbs a scene's feeling instead of merely describing what is in it.
Listen for the opening dubbing session before anyone appears. (sound)
An unseen director dictates an actor's words and moans from off screen, so the most intimate sound in the film is revealed as scripted by somebody else.
Payoff: The film tells you right away that voice and desire in this world are rarely anyone's own.
Watch for the typewriter and the letters Pablo writes. (setting)
Pablo, dissatisfied with his lover Juan, types letters and signs them in Juan's name, an object that keeps returning at key moments in the story.
Payoff: He is writing the lover he wants into existence rather than accepting the one he has.
Watch how often the film stages a performance inside itself. (staging)
Pablo directs Tina in a play built from Cocteau's monologue, a woman alone with a phone and an absent lover, staged within the larger film about absent lovers.
Payoff: The play is not commentary on the story, it is the story again, in miniature, on a stage.
Once you have seen it
Look again at the letters once you know who really wrote them. (setting)
Pablo composed his own love letters and signed Juan's name to them, and it is the letter-Juan, more articulate than the real one, that the tragedy runs on.
Payoff: A manufactured version of a person turns out to matter as much as the real one. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading calls Pablo a forger here: not a liar but someone who makes a version others must treat as real.
Notice how Antonio's calm never quite matches what he does. (performance)
Banderas plays him with a smoldering blankness that holds steady even as his possessive love escalates into stalking, violence, and finally a hostage siege.
Payoff: The stillness is not restraint, it is a drive erupting on a slope that only runs one direction. In the reading: impulse-image. The reading calls this the impulse-image: a character who is not developing but simply driven, downhill, by appetite.
Track how Tina's past is withheld until late in the film. (structure)
Her history with her father and her transition surfaces only gradually, timed by Salcedo's cutting to land as emotional detonation rather than plain explanation.
Payoff: The film waits to give you the fact so that it lands as feeling first, information second.
Carry this in: Watch which declarations of love are spoken by the person who actually means them. Almost none are.