Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of You’re Missing the Point
1940 · Juan Bustillo Oro · You’re Missing the Point on Sightlines
A man stands in a rich family's parlor in clothes that hang wrong on him: trousers hitched up, shoulders slouched, eyes sliding sideways. He only came to deal with a mad dog. But the master of the house walked in, and the maid, who is his girlfriend, panicked and said the first thing she could think of. This stranger, she said, is Leonardo, the mistress's brother, lost for years. Nobody planned it. Now Cantinflas has to be Leonardo, and all he has to be Leonardo with is his mouth.
So he talks. Watch the faces around him while he does. He isn't exactly lying. He produces sentences shaped like politeness, shaped like family feeling, shaped like a man explaining where he has been all this time, and every one of them bends away before it gets anywhere. The master nods along. He has his reasons. His father-in-law's will pays out only when all the brothers are together, so a returned brother, however ragged, is money walking through the door. The bum gets treated like a king.
Mexican Spanish later made a verb out of what Cantinflas does here: cantinflear, to talk a great deal and say nothing. Not many films leave a word behind in the language. This is the film that made Mario Moreno a screen star, and the reason is in that parlor.
Gilles Deleuze can help us see how the joke is built. His name for classical cinema is the action-image: a situation calls for an act, and the act changes the situation. He describes two shapes it takes. The large form starts from a big situation and presses toward a decisive act, as in the western. The small form runs the other way. A small act shows us a situation we couldn't see. Deleuze thought burlesque comedy was the purest small form, and Chaplin its master. Chaplin's genius, he argued, was finding one gesture that fits two different situations. His example is from The Immigrant: a man at a ship's rail, seen from behind, seems to be heaving with seasickness. Then he turns around, and he has caught a fish. Deleuze calls this the index of equivocity, meaning the same act could belong to either world.
Bustillo Oro's film moves that gag from the body into the voice. A sentence from Cantinflas is an equivocal gesture. The master, who needs a brother, hears a long-lost relative reminiscing. We know he's a tramp, so we hear a man stalling for his life. The same words belong to both situations, and the funny part is that both hearings are correct.
This only works because we are standing outside the lie. The film makes sure we always know more than the characters about who is being mistaken for whom. Deleuze calls an image built on what the viewer holds in mind a relation-image. The audience becomes a knowing third party in the scene. Hitchcock's suspense is his great example of it. Farce is its comic cousin: every lie needs another lie, and we hold the whole chain while each character holds one link.
The household runs on what Deleuze calls marks, habitual signs that tell you what comes next. A gentleman sits like this. A brother-in-law greets you like that. Cantinflas is a walking demark, the anomaly that breaks the habit and forces somebody to interpret. His slouch reads wrong against the elegant rooms every single time. So the family has to explain him to themselves, and each explanation they come up with props up the lie a little longer. You could also call his whole body a gest, Brecht's word, which Deleuze borrowed, for a posture that lays a social relation bare. The pelado, the underclass street figure, doesn't need to say he comes from below. His trousers say it.
Here is what makes the film more than a mix-up. The pelado can't win by force, and he can't win by status. So the fight moves into language itself. He picks up the cadences of authority, the courtesy and officialese and reasoned argument of the people above him, and he empties them out. Deleuze has a name for this move too. In the reflection-image, action is transposed into figure and discourse instead of being played out directly. The conflict here is a class conflict, but it gets fought one sentence at a time, and his weapon is to make words useless to the people who own them.
Set this against what film theorists feared when sound arrived: that synchronized talk would bury cinema's visual art. Chaplin held out for years. His tramp stays silent through Modern Times, which only lets him sing a song of made-up words. Cantinflas offers another answer. He makes speech the gag and then drains the meaning out of it. In a way it's silent comedy performed with the mouth.
The lineage is easy to hear. The ragged outsider who deflates authority, with a whole film framed around one comic body, comes from The Kid. From Modern Times comes the sturdy plot whose only job is to feed the star set pieces against faceless institutions. Groucho in Duck Soup, firing official-sounding nonsense at governments, is the direct ancestor of cantinflear. So is the "sanity clause" scene in A Night at the Opera, which shreds a legal contract into double-talk. Allá en el Rancho Grande had already shown the Mexican industry how to organize a seasoned studio ensemble around a single star. And this film became the template for two decades of Cantinflas vehicles that followed.
The quietest invention belongs to the director. In Dos monjes, Bustillo Oro had staged in shadowed, expressionist style. Here he gives that up. The lighting is even and the camera holds medium shots so the whole body stays in frame. He keeps each shot running long enough for a monologue to spiral, then cuts to a baffled listener to show what the fog has done. A director stepping back on purpose, so a performer can step forward, is also authorship.
That patience raises a question the film doesn't answer. Deleuze's action-image depends on things linking up: perception leads to action, and action leads to change. A Cantinflas sentence goes nowhere. It doesn't lead to an act, it just takes up time, and the camera waits through it. Inside a perfectly conventional farce, how much does that stall open up? When you watch it, keep an eye on the listeners more than on him. Notice the moment each one stops trying to understand and simply waits for the words to end. That's where the detail is.
Concepts in play
- action-image (small form) — The premise runs from a small act to a disclosed situation: the maid's panicked lie about who the intruder is reveals the inheritance logic that makes the master welcome a tramp as family.
- index of equivocity — Cantinflas's speech fits two situations at once. The master hears a long-lost brother-in-law talking, while we, knowing he's a bum, hear evasive verbal fog. It's Chaplin's double-situation gesture moved into the voice.
- the mental-image (relation-image) — The editing keeps the audience always knowing more than the characters about who is mistaken for whom. Farce's chain of lies works because the viewer holds the whole set of relations.
- demark — Cantinflas's slouch, hitched trousers and sidelong glances keep reading 'wrong' against the elegant bourgeois interiors, which breaks the household's habitual signs of class and forces the characters to interpret him.
- the gest — The pelado's posture and physical business, kept whole in medium and medium-long shots, show his class position in his body. The performance doubles as a social gesture.
- reflection-image (the Figure) — Unable to win by force or status, the pelado moves the class conflict into discourse, imitating the cadences of authority, courtesy and argument while emptying them of meaning (cantinflear).