Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Two for the Road
1967 · Stanley Donen · Two for the Road on Sightlines
A white Mercedes comes down a road in France. Coming the other way, on the same tarmac, is a beaten MG carrying the same two people years younger, still in love and about to stop being. The film says nothing about this. No dissolve, no caption, no voice from the future explaining that one of these cars is a memory. Stanley Donen simply lets them share a road.
Hold that shot, because Two for the Road is built out of what it implies: that you can be in several parts of a marriage at the same time.
The usual word for what the film does is "flashback," and the word is wrong in a way worth fixing. In most movies a memory arrives in uniform: the harp, the ripple, the face going soft, the past announcing itself as past so you know where to file it. Deleuze had a name for that well-behaved unit: the recollection-image, a former present, dated and represented, safely subordinate to the present doing the recalling. The grammar exists to keep the past in its place. Frederic Raphael's screenplay — the structure is his, written on the page, not discovered in the cutting room — takes the uniform off. Richard Marden cuts between eras on a road, a door, a turn of the head, a line of dialogue answered a decade later by a different version of the same person. Nothing tells you where you are. You work it out from the car and the dress.
Deleuze's term for time shown directly, rather than measured by movement, is the chronosign, and this film runs two of its shapes at once.
The first he called peaks of present: several presents, each fully live, none demoted to memory. The sunburned girl hitchhiking and the cool wife in sunglasses are not a woman and her recollection of herself. They are both now. The passing cars prove it — two nows in one shot, and the film refuses to rank them.
The second is sheets of past: the past as coexisting regions you enter whole, rather than as dated incidents. Christopher Challis lights each journey at its own temperature and never announces it. The hitchhiking is blown out and sunburned. The MG honeymoon is warm and close. The Mercedes present is cold and reflective, all glass, chrome, sunglasses and swimming pools. You know which marriage you are in before anyone speaks. Costume does the same work: Donen took Hepburn out of Givenchy and put her, under fashion editor Clare Rendlesham, into Quant, Foale and Tuffin, Rabanne's linked discs — because an unsignposted film needs a clock. Deleuze calls an object that means by its customary chain a mark: see this, expect that. Here the mark carries the date, and reading it is the audience's job.
Why bother with this vocabulary? Because "nonlinear" describes the shuffle and explains nothing about the ache. What the structure removes is sequence, and sequence is all a marriage story normally has to work with. Take it away and there can be no decline, because the first kiss no longer comes before the betrayal. It sits next to it. Every tender scene plays over an ironic bass line, every vicious one is cushioned by warmth already given, and both feelings land together because you have been handed the whole marriage at once. That inseparability is what Deleuze means by the crystal-image: an image where the actual thing and its virtual double can't be prised apart. Cheap versions use mirrors. Donen uses a windshield and a road.
The cuts are what Deleuze called the irrational cut, or the interstice — a join that belongs to neither shot, so that what you feel is the gap. Not "and then." Just AND. The rhyme gets you across; the twelve-year drop underneath is the point.
That is Resnais's grammar. Hiroshima mon amour had already cut from present to memory on a gesture, with no optical transition, and the debt is exact. The rest of the ancestry is American and comic. The Awful Truth, where a couple's cruelest exchanges are the evidence of attachment. His Girl Friday, whose overlapping, interrupted dialogue Donen and Marden reuse so that the Wallaces talking across each other reads as intimacy. The breakfast-table montage in Citizen Kane, the studio-era proof that a marriage can be narrated by ellipsis and repeated staging. And under the premise, Journey to Italy: an English-speaking couple in a car on foreign roads, the marriage audited in available light, the automobile serving as a confessional. Rossellini found the stage; Donen furnished it and kept the light. Challis shot a color star vehicle largely in real exteriors, and the grain and flare read as documentary — Bazin's real space smuggled into a Fox comedy. Finney brought the other half of the abrasion, arriving from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with his class-inflected naturalism intact, roughing up Hepburn's studio polish in every two-shot.
What Donen and Raphael invented was the yoking. Modernist time-structure had been the property of art cinema and its seriousness; here it carries two stars, a Mancini theme and jokes, in 2.35:1 Panavision — a format built for spectacle, spent almost entirely on measuring the distance between two faces in a car. The car is the film's closed set: fixed seats, forced proximity, no exit, eyes forward. Nearly the whole picture is a dialogue for two people who cannot look at each other.
Two more things it smuggles past a studio comedy's defenses. The recurring meal at which nothing is said is dead time — duration held with no action in it, the everyday refusing to advance — and the film turns it into its best joke. What sort of people sit through an entire meal without speaking? Married people. And Hepburn ages a dozen years without a scrap of prosthetic, working in posture, vocal placement and rhythm. The young Joanna talks fast and leans in. The older one has learned to wait. Deleuze's gest is exactly that: a posture that exposes a relation. Waiting is the gest of this marriage, and this is the performance Hepburn is most often reported to have called her own favorite.
The journeys change nothing, which is the last Deleuzian point and the most 1967 one. Five trips down the same road to the same client's villa: the voyage-balade, travel that arrives and transforms nothing. Mark is an architect who spends the film designing houses for other people while living in a tent, a rented room, a hotel.
Half a century of imitation has made the unannounced time-shift ordinary; you have seen it in any number of relationship films that cut between an affair's beginning and its end without saying which is which. Here it was still an argument rather than a technique. When you rewatch, follow the smallest of the running gags: who is driving. The film keeps asking. The answer keeps changing. It was never about the car.
Concepts in play
- Peaks of present (series of time) — Cars from different periods occupying the same stretch of tarmac, the couple effectively passing themselves — five journeys each played as a live present rather than as a past recalled from the Mercedes drive.
- Sheets of past (order of coexistence) — Challis gives each stratum its own light temperature without announcing it — blown-out sunburn for the hitchhiking, warm and close for the MG honeymoon, cold and reflective for the Mercedes present — so the viewer enters a whole region of the marriage rather than a dated incident.
- Irrational cut / interstice — Transitions made on graphic and gestural rhymes — a road, a door, a turn of the head, a line answered a decade later by a different version of the same person — with no dissolve, title or narration to make the join belong to either era.
- Recollection-image (mnemosign) — Defined by refusal: the film moves between eras without any conventional flashback grammar, stripping the announcing device exactly as Resnais does in Hiroshima mon amour, so no stratum is subordinated to a present that recalls it.
- Crystal-image (hyalosign) — The present stratum shot in glass, chrome, sunglasses and swimming pools; the structure makes courtship, betrayal and reconciliation coexist, so every tender scene carries an ironic bass line and every bitter one is undercut by remembered warmth.
- Mark — Because the narrative is unsignposted, costume and car function as the film's timecode — the failing MG against the white Mercedes, Givenchy replaced by Quant, Foale and Tuffin and Rabanne's linked-disc dress — objects read by their customary chain.
- Dead time (temps mort) — The recurring meal at which nothing is said, and the exchange it produces: what sort of people sit through an entire meal without speaking? Married people.
- The gest — Hepburn plays across roughly twelve years without prosthetic aging, doing it through posture, vocal placement and rhythm — the young Joanna talks quickly and leans in, the older one has learned to wait.
- Voyage/balade form — Five journeys along more or less the same route to the same client's villa; the trips arrive without transforming anything, and Mark designs other people's houses while living in a tent, a rented room, a hotel.
- The closed set (cadre) — A 2.35:1 Panavision frame developed for spectacle given over to the car as a two-hander stage — fixed seating, forced proximity, no exit, eyes forward — and to wide compositions stranding the couple at opposite ends of hotel rooms.