Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Déjà Vu
2006 · Tony Scott · Déjà Vu on Sightlines
5 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 past looks a half-step cooler than the present. (light)
Paul Cameron grades and textures the surveillance material so it reads as slightly other. Cooler, more diffuse, a touch off from the New Orleans light Carlin is standing in.
Payoff: You can tell which time you are looking at without a caption, which is what lets the film show you both at once.
Watch Washington watching a screen and not moving. (performance)
For long stretches of the middle hour Carlin does nothing but look. Washington plays him wry and grounded, then increasingly haunted, holding the absurdity of the situation without tipping into camp.
Payoff: A star built for action is parked in a chair, and the film makes his helplessness the emotional engine. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: the camera trained on a man who is himself perceiving, so you feel the apparatus between them.
Track what Carlin learns by watching instead of asking. (structure)
The investigation stops running on interviews and evidence and starts running on observation. He solves what is in front of him by reading a window into four days earlier, and you hold both clocks.
Payoff: You are the knowing third party keeping two timelines straight. The tension comes from what you can see that nobody on screen can. In the reading: the relation-image (mental-image). The reading calls this a relation-image: the case is assembled in the viewer's head out of connections nobody in the film holds all at once.
Listen for the hum and click under the lab scenes. (sound)
The mix builds the apparatus out of machine noise and an odd ambient presence, the sound of a past being watched. Against it, Harry Gregson-Williams keeps a quieter theme in reserve.
Payoff: The technology is given a texture you can hear, which makes a screen of raw footage feel like a place.
Notice the long lens flattening the New Orleans streets. (camera)
Scott's late manner is all over this. Telephoto compression, smeared neon, restless handheld, saturated warmth. It is more disciplined here than in Man on Fire, because the premise needs you to follow it.
Payoff: The style is doing the work it was built for. A film about the image of an image rewards a director obsessed with both.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the windshield and the monitors. Scott keeps putting two moments in one frame and asking you to hold both.