Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Law of Desire
1987 · Pedro Almodóvar · Law of Desire on Sightlines
A woman on a summer street in Madrid, too hot to stand it, asks the municipal street-cleaner to turn his hose on her. He does. The film stages it as ecstasy — relief and exposure at once, a body getting what it asked for, in public, on camera, at length. Nothing in the plot needs the shot. It is there because Pedro Almodóvar thinks relief is worth photographing.
Deleuze has a name for an image like that: a quality-power, an intensity presented for its own sake instead of as a step toward something. Most shots in most films exist to get you to the next shot. This one is finished where it stands. Keep it in mind, because Almodóvar's invention here is that he builds a whole film out of intensities like it and then drives a murder thriller straight through the middle of them.
The film's first scene tells you the rules. A dubbing session: an actor performing on screen, and off-screen a director's voice dictating the words, and the moans. The most erotic sound in the sequence is being written by somebody who isn't in the shot. Deleuze would call this an audiovisual disjunction — voice coming loose from the body it appears to belong to, so that picture and soundtrack stop confirming each other and start telling two stories. Classical cinema used sound as glue. Almodóvar opens by unsticking it, and never really sticks it back. Sound in this film is rarely innocent. It is usually someone else's script.
Then the typewriter. Pablo is a film director, and he is not getting the love he wants from his young lover Juan, so he types the letters he wishes Juan would send him and signs them in Juan's name. He manufactures his own beloved.
Deleuze's term for this is the powers of the false, and his figure for it is the forger. The forger is not a liar. A liar hides the truth; a forger makes something that everyone afterwards has to deal with as real. This matters to film theory specifically, because cinema's oldest promise — the one André Bazin defended, that the photographic image is a witness, that the thing was there in front of the lens — is exactly the promise the post-war cinema starts breaking. Almodóvar reduces the whole philosophical problem to a plot device you can see: the letter composes its object and then replaces it. Deleuze calls that a crystalline description. The Juan in the letters is more articulate, more available, more in love than the one in the apartment, and it is the letter-Juan the tragedy runs on.
Why insist on this lens rather than just calling the film a melodrama about a stalker? Because the film will not let the manufactured version be dismissed. Every declaration of feeling here is quoted, dubbed, typed, or acted, and none of it is thereby less binding. People die of authored desire.
Which is why the theatre is in the film. Pablo directs his sister Tina in Cocteau's La Voix humaine: a woman alone onstage with a telephone and a lover who is not coming back. Rossellini had already filmed that monologue in 1948 with Anna Magnani, in L'Amore, and Almodóvar's debt is unusually literal — he takes the source text itself and re-stages it inside his own picture. Deleuze's word for an image that can't be separated from its own reflection is the crystal-image, and the little theatre planted inside a film is his favourite instance: a seed dropped into the story around which everything else crystallizes. Tina performing abandonment into a dead phone is not commenting on the plot. She is doing what every character is doing. The stage is only where it becomes readable. It also makes the telephone the film's symbol in the strict sense — an object that condenses the relation the whole thing turns on. A device for speaking love in one direction.
The look carries the same load. Ángel Luis Fernández shoots in saturated near-hallucinatory colour, red above all, in frontal, poster-flat compositions. That inheritance is precise: Sirk's Written on the Wind, where a feeling nobody can say migrates into a lamp or a wall; Ray's Johnny Guitar, where colour and performance are permitted to go operatic. Deleuze called this the colour-image, colour that absorbs a scene rather than describing it. Almodóvar's amendment is the lighting. Sirk diffuses. Almodóvar goes hard and bright, so the artificiality is fully lit and unapologetic, and reads as candour rather than concealment.
And then Antonio, played by a young Antonio Banderas with a smouldering blankness that keeps his violence frightening and pitiable at the same time. He is Deleuze's impulse-image: not a character who develops but a drive erupting under the social surface, on a slope that only goes downward, wanting until the wanting produces a corpse and a siege. Vertigo is the admitted architecture — the lover who would remake and control and finally destroy the beloved. Note what this does structurally. Melodrama cannot generate an action, because melodrama is made of feeling with nowhere to go. So Almodóvar imports the action from a different genre entirely and lets it invade. José Salcedo's cutting is what makes that survivable; he moves between farce, erotic reverie and suspense without a visible seam, and he holds Tina's withheld history — her father, her transition — until it detonates rather than merely explains.
Fassbinder had gone first there, in In a Year of 13 Moons: a trans protagonist granted the full romantic seriousness of melodrama instead of being handled as a case. Almodóvar takes that move and removes the doom. Carmen Maura's Tina gets fury and dignity and a future. Deleuze's name for characters who make themselves up in public, out loud, because no existing image fits them, is fabulation — legending as a way of existing. Pablo types his own love letters. Tina performs abandonment under stage lights. These people are inventing the public they belong to, which in Spain in 1987, a decade out of Franco, had barely been filmed at all.
That is also the year Almodóvar stopped being a scrappy underground figure. Law of Desire was the first production of El Deseo, the company he founded with his brother Agustín, which is to say the first film nobody could ask him to trim. It shows. What it did to the art is settle an old condescension: melodrama's excess is not a lesser mode but the only one honest enough for lives that realism had no shelf for. New Queer Cinema would be named a few years later and define itself against the tragic-homosexual ending. This film had already refused it, without announcing that it was doing anything brave.
Watch it again and count the declarations of love that aren't spoken by the person who means them. Dubbed, typed, signed in another man's hand, delivered on a stage, said into a telephone to no one. It's nearly all of them. The film's real question is whether that makes them counterfeit, and its answer is the woman standing in the water on the street.
Concepts in play
- le faussaire (the forger) — Pablo types the love letters he wishes to receive from Juan and signs them in his lover's name — manufacturing the beloved rather than deceiving anyone.
- crystalline-description — The forged letters compose a Juan who is more articulate and more in love than the real one, and that composed object replaces its original as what the drama runs on.
- audiovisual-disjunction — The opening dubbing session: an actor performs on screen while an off-screen director's voice dictates the words and the moans he must produce.
- crystal-seed (the crystal in formation) — Cocteau's La Voix humaine staged inside the film — Tina alone with a telephone and an absent lover — planted as a mirror around which the whole film's abandonment and one-sided passion crystallize.
- affective colour — Ángel Luis Fernández's saturated, near-hallucinatory reds and frontal poster-flat compositions, inherited from Sirk's Written on the Wind, where décor and colour carry the feeling the dialogue withholds.
- qualité-puissance — Tina asking a municipal street-cleaner to hose her down on a sweltering summer street, staged as an ecstatic image of relief and exposure that advances nothing.
- impulse-image — Antonio's possessive fixation — Banderas's 'smouldering blankness' — as a drive beneath the social surface that only descends, from obsession to murder to the hostage climax.
- symbol — The telephone as 'the umbilical of longing,' recurring in the Cocteau monologue and across the film as the object condensing love spoken in one direction.
- fabulation (legending) — Writing and performance treated as acts that manufacture reality — Pablo's forged letters, Tina's staged abandonment — in a post-Franco Spain where gay and trans lives had almost no prior screen image to inherit.