Luca · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Water hits a boy's arm in a sunlit piazza and the skin goes to scales.

That is the engine of the whole picture, and it's worth being exact about what kind of engine it is. In Luca, a spilled glass is a plot. A rain cloud is a threat. The Ligurian sea, which in any other Riviera film would be scenery, is the one substance in the world that can undo a boy in front of everybody he wants to be liked by.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action lands; the cutting exists to carry that chain. In the time-image, action stops working and the character is reduced to watching. Luca is emphatically the first kind, and its shape is as classical as a hymn: a confined life under the water, a friend who cracks it open, a trespass into the forbidden world above, a rift, an exposure, a reconciliation that lets the two boys part having changed each other. So why bring Deleuze near it at all? Because he is unusually good on the fine machinery of a working movement-image, and Casarosa's machinery is strange.

Deleuze divides the action-image into two shapes. The large form starts from an enormous situation that bears down until one decisive act transforms it: the Western, the war film, most superhero cinema. The small form runs the other way, where an act discloses a situation that was hidden. Luca is almost purely small form, which is why it feels so unlike its blockbuster neighbours. Nobody saves anything. Boys pedal a bicycle, sit down at a stranger's dinner table, assemble a Vespa out of junk, and each ordinary act pries a concealed world further into view.

The finest name for what that produces is Deleuze's index of equivocity: a gesture that could belong to two entirely different situations, with nothing in the gesture itself to tell you which. A boy running down a cobbled street is a boy running down a cobbled street. He is also a sea monster one cloudburst from being seen. Portorosso doubles every action this way, and both the comedy and the low hum of dread come from the same doubling. The film generates suspense without ever raising its stakes, because two readings of one body stay alive inside a single frame.

What arbitrates between those readings is water, which in a harbour town is everywhere. Deleuze calls an object meaningful through habit a mark: see the gun, expect the shot. He calls the anomaly that breaks habit and forces you to interpret a demark. Casarosa's invention is small and exact — he demarks the most ordinary substance in his own world. On that coast water is weather, work, lunch, play, livelihood. Here it is the one thing every viewer tracks with anxiety, and once you notice, you see how much of the staging is really water-choreography: awnings, fountains, the working harbour, a sky, a triathlon whose first leg is a swim.

Standing against the water is the Vespa. Deleuze's symbol is the object that condenses a film's organizing relation, and Daniela Strijleva's design work is unembarrassed about its iconography: the Vespa, the telescope, the book, the family table. The scooter isn't transport. It's the shape freedom takes when you're eleven and have never seen a map.

Then there's the register. Kim White's lighting runs saturated blue against warm ochre, soft in a way no coast actually is — that softness is how a coast is remembered. Deleuze's colour-image names exactly this, a colour that soaks up a scene and its feeling instead of describing a place. The sound design does the structural version: muffled and resonant below the surface, bright clatter above. Textbook relative out-of-field, a frame that never stops implying the space you aren't in. And Catherine Apple's cutting is unhurried on purpose, making room for small humiliations and for nothing much happening. Deleuze calls those passages dead time. In an American animated feature, where every second is normally load-bearing, letting a summer just be a summer is the formally radical act.

That's where the lineage matters, and Casarosa is candid about it. The loafing structure comes from Fellini's I Vitelloni, the great film of provincial young men achieving nothing beside the Adriatic. For Deleuze the postwar Italians are precisely where the action-image began to crack and the stroll started replacing the plot; Luca borrows the stroll's texture and keeps the plot. Amarcord supplies the other half, childhood recalled as storybook and townsfolk drawn as affectionate caricature. Ercole the preening bully is that tradition's local representative, and the Portorosso crowd works as what Deleuze calls a dividual, a collective that fears and turns as one body. The Japanese debts are just as specific: the sun-bleached Mediterranean palette and seaside architecture of Porco Rosso, the daily-life rhythms of Kiki's Delivery Service, and above all Ponyo, whose hand-drawn sea creature becoming a human child is the direct template for the morph. The Red Turtle, five years earlier, had already put a human/sea-creature transformation into flat, illustrative stylization. Luca joins an argument already in progress.

And that argument is the film's significance. Through the late 2010s Pixar pushed hard toward physically accurate light, hair, cloth and water — a kind of digital Bazinism, chasing the asymptote of photographic truth. Luca defects. Its production had to steer a realism-tuned pipeline toward caricature: simplified silhouettes, painterly skies, exaggerated proportion, storybook scatter in the underwater light. Virtuosity is spent in one place only, the transformation, where two incompatible body designs have to flow into each other and be believed. Everything else is given away to warmth.

Watch Alberto while you're there. Jack Dylan Grazer's swagger is a posture, not a mood, and it exposes a relation rather than expressing a feeling: Deleuze's gest. Animation is its purest medium, because every attitude a drawn body holds was authored by somebody. The bravado is the loneliness, worn outward.

The one thing the film won't do is price the secret. Its entire grammar runs on concealment, and then the ending grants acceptance and lets that machinery dissolve. Generosity, or wish? Casarosa doesn't say, and the not-saying is why the last act stays gentle instead of tragic. It's a fair thing to argue with.

Luca reached most of us on July 18, 2021, on Disney+, at home, on a television, with only limited theatrical engagements. A film arguing that the small scale is not the slight scale arrived at the small scale. What it hands forward is a permission more than a look: that a Pixar feature can be one director's Genoese boyhood, that a climax can be a pasta-eating contest, that a render farm built for truth can be pointed at memory instead.

"Silenzio Bruno" is the mantra Casarosa gives Luca for shutting up his own fear. It works on an audience too. Watch it again and follow the water — the small film turns out to have been keeping two entire worlds in the air with a single glass of it.