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
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 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.
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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the exact moment each man stops being able to act; it's rarely a big scene.