Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of On Probation
2005 · Damián Szifron · On Probation on Sightlines
There's a moment in Tiempo de valientes where a man is holding a gun and is being asked, right then, how he feels about his wife. He answers. He's the kind of man who answers. The person asking is a psychologist who is only in that car because a judge put him there, and who would very much like to go home.
That's the film. It is also, if you want one, a free lesson in Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze wrote two books on cinema in the 1980s, and the first is built on one mechanism: the movement-image. A character perceives a situation, something in them registers it, they act, and the act changes the situation. Perception, affect, action, loop closed. He called the cinema that runs on that loop the action-image, and Hollywood ran on it for fifty years. The detective picture is one of its sleeker variants, what Deleuze called the small form: you don't start from the big picture and narrow down, you start from a gesture, a body, a stray thing out of place, and each move the investigator makes discloses a little more of a situation that was hidden all along. Act reveals world. That is exactly how this film moves. Nobody sits us down and explains the double homicide. Two men blunder into it and it opens underneath them.
Which brings us to what's broken.
Deleuze's most famous claim is about the moment that loop failed. After the war, in Italy first, characters began seeing things they could not act on. The link between perceiving and doing went slack. He called it the crisis of the action-image, and his second book swings on that hinge: once a character can only watch, time itself comes forward and cinema changes.
Szifron's invention is to take that crisis, shrink it to the size of one man, and make the plot about repairing it. Alfredo is a Buenos Aires detective with a double homicide in front of him and no ability to work it, because his wife is sleeping with someone else. He perceives perfectly. He simply cannot discharge what he perceives into action. He is a Deleuzian seer stuck inside a genre that requires an agent. And the man assigned to fix him is a psychologist, sentenced to the job, doing community service after a traffic accident.
Bergson gave Deleuze the term for what's wrong with Alfredo. A living thing is a centre of indetermination: a gap in the chain of matter where a stimulus arrives and the response does not automatically follow. Hesitation is the human specialty. The interval is where we live. Alfredo's interval has swollen shut; everything goes in and nothing comes out. So therapy here is not only a joke about the Argentine appetite for analysis, though it's that too. It is a repair of the interval. Buddy movies have always half-known that the plot fixes the man so the man can finish the plot. This one says it out loud and puts the technician on the payroll.
Once you see that, the film's strangest formal habit stops being a gag. Deleuze borrows a word from Brecht, the gest: a posture that exposes an entire social relation in one shape. The couch posture, transplanted into a moving vehicle, is a gest. Two men sitting at that particular angle to each other, one asking, one deflecting, while the city goes past at speed. What it exposes is a culture where talking a feeling through at length is normal behaviour rather than an emergency. Szifron just refuses to stop doing it during the gunfights.
And the talking does structural work. Deleuze has a category for the image in which action is transposed into figure and discourse instead of being performed. Alfredo's marriage is that. He cannot act on the affair; nothing in the grammar of a wronged man's revenge is available to him that wouldn't wreck him. So it becomes something to be spoken, and the film discharges the physical energy somewhere else, into the case, into the chases. That is the engine. Words and bullets trade places. The plot he's allowed to shoot at is the one that isn't his.
Scale matters here, and it's part of why Argentine audiences took this film as common property. Deleuze notes that the action-image breathes, alternating between the big encompassing space of the milieu and the taut narrow line of the action running through it. Szifron does that breathing with a helicopter sequence of genuine Hollywood swagger, at a budget that wasn't supposed to permit it, and then cuts back to two guys on a car seat discussing transference. Vast, then tiny. The widescreen isn't decoration. It's the lung.
He knew precisely what he was borrowing. 48 Hrs. built the mismatched pair whose friction is the propulsion. Lethal Weapon, via Shane Black, gave each partner a private wound for the action plot to excavate slowly, and Szifron takes that literally and hires a licensed excavator. Beverly Hills Cop found the comic register of a wrong man loose inside police machinery, which in Deleuze's vocabulary is close to a demark, an object yanked out of its customary series so that you have to read it fresh: a couch does not belong in a homicide unit. Midnight Run proved that escalating banter between reluctant companions can do the work of exposition. Analyze This supplied the hook outright, the therapist conscripted mid-crisis. And The Sopranos, running at the same moment, had shown that formal analyst's-couch sessions could be cut against genre violence as counterpoint rather than as relief.
What Szifron adds is this. In every one of those, the wound is a pretext, a bit of warmth to make the machine likeable. Here the wound is the machine. The case cannot advance until the man does.
Going forward, the debt is paid to himself. The engine assembled here is running at full speed in Wild Tales a decade later: the same precision, the same willingness to let people talk themselves all the way into catastrophe, the same conviction that Argentine cinema can build any machine Hollywood can build and fuel it with local speech.
That's the significance, and it isn't small. Read quickly, Deleuze's two books look like a one-way street: movement-image, crisis, time-image, and anyone still making action pictures afterward is either naive or ironic about it. Tiempo de valientes is neither. It was made by someone who studied the American form down to the frame and has no interest in mocking it. It treats the action-image as a machine rather than a period, portable and rebuildable, and improvable if you give it something the original didn't have. Here that something is the patience to let a man finish a sentence about his marriage while the engine is running.
Watch it for the moment the two circuits fuse, when a thing said on the couch is what cracks the case. Then ask which of them was really serving the sentence, and which one was in treatment.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Alfredo is a detective who perceives a double homicide and cannot work it, because he is too heartbroken over his wife's affair to act; the film shrinks Deleuze's postwar diagnosis to the size of one character and makes the plot about repairing him
- the interval / centre of indetermination — the therapy-during-investigation structure: a psychologist sentenced to community service is assigned to restore a man's ability to convert what he perceives into what he does
- action-image, small form — the double-homicide case is never briefed to us; Mariano is accidentally involved and each move the pair make discloses more of a situation that was hidden, act revealing world rather than world dictating act
- the gest — the couch posture transplanted into a moving vehicle — transference analyzed at gunpoint, sessions conducted across car chases — an attitude that exposes the national habit of talking a feeling through at length and under fire
- the reflection-image / the Figure — the affair, on which Alfredo cannot act, is transposed into discourse on the couch while the film discharges the equivalent physical energy into the case and the chases
- respiration-space — a helicopter sequence of Hollywood scale and widescreen set pieces alternating with two men on a car seat working through transference: vast milieu, then the taut two-man line
- demark — the comic register imported from Beverly Hills Cop — a civilian psychologist and his analytic apparatus wrenched out of their customary series and set loose inside police machinery, forcing reinterpretation of every procedural cue
- binomial — the mismatched-pair structure inherited from 48 Hrs. and Midnight Run, where friction between the unwilling civilian and the hardened cop supplies the duel that drives both the comedy and the forward momentum