We have no future

Sonny is the desire of an elsewhere, the perpetual will to disconnect from the world, mentally as well as physically

(...)

Sonny, on the other hand is unpredictable and instinctive; he carries in him a desire for rupture, deviation, and unbalance.

(...)

Like Sonny a few minutes earlier, Isabella remains aloof, on the edge of the frame, and provokes the displacement of the shot towards its margins.

(...)

The couple then becomes scarce in relation to a narrative that the film, for twelve minutes, leaves in suspense. Mann then stresses at length their trip, from the coast of Florida to that of Havana: time relaxes, the distances hollow out space again. Their breakaway functions like a gasp of air, an attempt to recover a space against the flux

(...)

Without the woman, the man is nothing. If he loses this ballast, he falls (Alonzo’s suicide, return to the flux and darkness for Sonny at the end of the film); if he finds her again, he remains on the surface (Trudy comes out of a coma and Ricardo wakes up). But Isabella isn’t the only one to hold this power of aspiration and de-framing. In Miami Vice, women are the only ones to possess the power to divert the narrative (Yero’s jealousy, secretly in love with Isabella), to calm it (amorous sequence between Ricardo and Trudy) or to speed it up (Trudy taken hostage; Lonetta’s death). From the first sequence, Mann expressly makes women the pivot of all the swerves

(...)

Sonny gives up, sucked up by this woman who looks like an icon. When she moves away in the car, Sonny’s gaze remains fixed on her and finds at last the axis of its desire: the only bright trace at the heart of this indecipherable night, point of sublime anchoring and dazzling gap, Isabella appears like the image of a possible elsewhere. But it’s only an image

(...)

“It was too good to last,” he says. Isabella takes off, alone, glancing one last time at Sonny. But no reverse shot is forthcoming: Sonny, already into his car, moves away and the optical axis that they formed together suddenly breaks. It is the moment to return to the flux. To give in. The world rediscovers its balance but loses a little more of its humanity. One of Sonny’s replies to Isabella comes to mind: “We can do nothing against gravity.” In other words, there is nothing to be done against the flux, except to extricate oneself for a short while. We end up always by going back to it and dissolving therein (the last shot of the film). Sonny: “We have no future.”

(...)

And melancholy is the only way of living on a long-term basis in the world.


Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Gravity of the Flux:Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, Senses of Cinema