Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch We All Loved Each Other So Much
1974 · Ettore Scola · We All Loved Each Other So Much on Sightlines
5 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
Notice the film switch from black and white to color. (light)
Scola shoots the 1940s scenes in high-contrast monochrome and later, more affluent decades in color, so the film stock itself marks how much time has passed.
Payoff: You can tell which era you're in by the texture of the image alone, before anything is said.
Notice the film begins near its own chronological end. (structure)
Scola opens close to where the story finishes and then spends thirty years explaining how three friends arrived at that point.
Payoff: You already know the outcome is not a happy one; the pleasure is in watching how it happened.
Watch a character suddenly turn and address the camera directly. (performance)
Several times the film breaks its own illusion, letting a character step outside a scene to comment on or judge his own life out loud.
Payoff: The men narrate their own failures to you, rather than leaving you to infer them. In the reading: fabulation (legending). Deleuze calls this legending, or fabulation: people caught in the act of telling the story of their own life.
Notice how differently Catenacci's home and Antonio's home look. (setting)
Scola stages the newly rich Catenacci's world in kitsch abundance against Antonio's cramped, modest rooms, using decor to mark where each man's loyalties landed.
Payoff: You can read a man's compromises off his furniture before he explains anything about them.
Watch for scenes that restage or quote other famous films. (structure)
The film repeatedly folds fragments of neorealist and Fellini and Antonioni movies into its own story, treating the characters' lives as inseparable from the films they loved.
Payoff: A generation is shown measuring its own life against the movies it grew up on. In the reading: crystal-image (hyalosign). Deleuze calls a moment where a memory or a movie becomes indistinguishable from the present a crystal image, and this film builds several.
Once you have seen it
Notice Nicola losing everything over a stubborn opinion about a film. (structure)
Nicola's love of cinema costs him a marriage, a career, and finally a television quiz he refuses to concede even when it would cost him nothing to bend.
Payoff: His conviction is honorable and it ruins him in equal measure, without the film choosing a side. In the reading: the seer (voyant). Deleuze calls a character who only watches and judges rather than acts a seer, and Nicola is the purest one here.
Notice how Gianni's charm never quite drops, even as he corrodes. (performance)
Gassman plays Gianni's slow betrayal of his own ideals underneath a surface that stays smooth and likable throughout, never tipping into obvious villainy.
Payoff: The most damaging compromise in the film is the one that never stops looking pleasant.
Notice each reunion measuring how far the friends have drifted. (structure)
The film returns repeatedly to the three men meeting again, and each reunion quietly registers the growing distance between who they were and who they've become.
Payoff: Time here is tracked by these gatherings, not by events; that's the real clock of the film.
Carry this in: Watch for the exact moment each man stops being able to act; it's rarely a big scene.