A dialogue results following the meeting between Borges and the man he met in front of the Charles River, north of Boston, Cambridge, in February 1969, which Borges concluded by saying:
- In that case, your name is Jorge Luis Borges and I am too Jorge Luis Borges!
At the end of their extended conversation, he asked him:
- If you have been me, how can you explain the fact that you’ve forgotten that you once encountered an elderly gentleman who in 1918 told you that he, too, was Borges?
The abovementioned incident is from a story by Borges entitled The Other, where Borges – the hero of the story – describes this incident as extremely odd when the person meets himself. However, this oddness led to the creation of stories and movies loved by the public. Since the emergence of the time travel concept, the means of traveling to the future continue to evolve, such as Al-Ma’arri’s travel in The Epistle of Forgiveness to the afterlife, where the hero strolls on a strong camel from Heaven. Added to this is the development of travel means with the invention of the “time machine” in Herbert George Wells’ novel The Time Machine in 1895, and subsequent relentless novelistic and cinematic journeys.
The Train
Trains follow a railroad track moving in one direction, often not having a railroad switch that allows additional options. Trains thus continue to run in a direction or its opposite, such as the Riyadh-Dammam train passing through Hofuf and Abqaiq. Having no other option, when someone misses the train, they have to wait for the next one to arrive, as the train heads to its destination, and returns again without changing its route.
The Locomotive
Ali Al-Hussian was successful in portraying the Borgesian idea of meeting oneself. Since Al-Hussian is from Al-Ahsa and is addicted to observing the movement of trains; he used the idea of time travel in his film “Spoiler”, with which he participated in the Saudi Film Competition in its fifth edition in the year 2019 and won three awards in the student film category (The Golden Palm, Best Director, and Best Actor). The film events take place in a hospital starring Rashid Al-Wrthan, as a sixty-year-old man, and Faisal Al-Dokhi, as a thirty-year-old young man. The sixty-year-old Saleh Al-Abdullah meets himself and he tries hard to change his life path, nevertheless, as we know, the train does not change its route. It was a shock for the sixty-year-old Saleh to face the fact that nothing would change reality when the thirty-year-old said in a clear tone: “You must understand that there is nothing you can change. Everything is written and set in stone!”
The director chose the hospital for this event, with the possibility of it serving as a railroad switch where he can try and save what could be saved. However, the course of events shifts towards the thirty-year-old man who stated that “everything is written and set in stone”, thus, we return to our station in a point that does not allow change. Just as Al-Hussian specified the place, he also specified the time period, as he chose an era representing the first half of the nineties, between 1992-1996, based on references that prevail throughout the film, such as the pager and the image of King Fahd, may his soul rest in peace. This era followed the Gulf crisis, believed to be the beginning of a conflict between transformation and stability – in a gray area in which “everything is written and set in stone”, the victory will be to halt the transformation.
As his first experience, the director excelled in Saudizing the Borgesian idea, had it not been for some slight dialogue slips that only the Saudis notice, such as choosing a geography teacher as a job for Saleh over another. This has been revealed to us by the sixty-year-old Saleh when he spoiled the events, as the title of the film state, that the thirty-year-old Saleh would not get promoted, which contradicts with the Saudi education system, as it is one of the fixed systems in which the teacher should not expect promotions to begin with. Therefore, this plot confutes the anticipation of getting a promotion by the sixty-year-old man. Teachers are not only enviable, they have some of the highest-income jobs in society, hence the director should have chosen another job for the audience to accept the events without scrutiny.
This film is considered to be flawless due to its astonishing plot, cinematography, and performance. It was an amazement accomplished by a student, who made a name for himself as a director whose productions we eagerly anticipate.
The Station
Modern train stations are cherished by their passengers because of the numerous events that take place in them. Some of these stations are characterized by a railroad switch to change routes to other directions. The movement of the train thus resembles time travel, where the imaginative person searches for stations to change his path. Nevertheless, it would not be unfamiliar to see novelists and filmmakers ride the train, but when physicists join the ride, there is no doubt that we are getting closer to real life and moving away from fantasy. Time travel was rejected according to Newton, but we find Einstein on the train after he bought his ticket to travel to the future! Physicists are discussing the possibility of time travel to the past only – as J. Richard Gott reports in his book Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe in 2001, while on the other hand, Einstein believes that time travel is possible.
The Journey
J. Richard Gott predicted the future of the Berlin Wall according to an equation he had drawn, after discovering the Copernican principle in 1969, and told his friends about it during their conversations over lunch. However, he did not publish it until the wall itself actually fell in 1989 and urged him to do so, twenty years after his prediction.
The Berlin Wall seems to be the focal attention of time travelers. The Spanish film “Mirage” (2018) was produced around this idea. The events take place on November 9, 1989, the date of the fall of the Wall, where it displays a twelve-year-old boy named Nico, who is recording himself playing guitar using his personal camera, while a storm hits his city.
No Time for Introductions
While many movies have a prologue scene that occurs within the first 10-15 minutes, this movie starts interweaving the events early, with Nico witnessing the killing of his neighbor by her husband, and his attempt to enter his neighbor’s villa, until the surprise occurrence of his death in a traffic accident after he escaped from the house in terror.
This acceleration of events took place within exactly 6 minutes, thus, after that, the movie begins to explain the plot to the shocked audience. The sequence of events starts when a family, consisting of three people, a husband, a wife, and their daughter, resides in the boy’s house after 25 years, until it reaches the climax scene in which the camera records everything before the boy’s death.
The Time Machine
Every time traveler has attempted to invent his own machine. Since Herbert George Wells’ novel, time machines vary according to their inventor’s imagination. Gott referred to the novel Timescape by Gregory Benford, in which the events take place in 1998, when the protagonist sent tachyon-induced messages, which are hypothetical particles moving at a speed faster than light, to the year 1963, warning scientists of an environmental catastrophe sweeping the world in 1998.
“Mirage” applied this reference, which is why the machine in the movie was compatible with the cinematic genre, where Paulo chose the camera to play the role of the machine. Vera Roy, played by Adriana Ugarte, found out what happened to Nico and she was able to communicate with the boy after watching the recording of him playing guitar. She then tried to warn him not to go out and gave him some signs to support what she said, including the occurrence of the storm, which was the tool to travel in time using the camera instead of tachyons, and the sign of schools closing as she had already told him. Vera was able to change the expected route of the train and keep Nico alive as he dodged the bullet and did not go to his neighbor’s house.
Train Driver
Every journey must have a specific date and direction, for that reason, knowing the dates and the number of possibilities is important in such a case. This is what the director Oriol Paulo was able to achieve with the movie, as he shifted from being a screenwriter to being a director. He wove the plot in a way that creates and estimates the upcoming events of the probabilities game during the available 72 hours of this journey, which is the duration of the storm. The potential of changing the probabilities was possible only during these hours, based on the change of the events that occurs with the boy’s death and resurrection.
This event is followed by a scene displaying what could have been. Every journey has its price, and this is what Vera must understand, due to the fact that she has sacrificed her medical future in exchange for her stable married life with a beautiful daughter, by becoming a nurse instead of a doctor.
Paulo realizes the price of each situation and invests in it through the scenario, since he is aware of its importance to the movie, he deals with the scenario as a seed that will grow to be a tree. He was keen to implement this in his movie by interweaving the plot, just like intertwining tree branches and trimming them, and editing the parts seamlessly to make the scenario and the narrative progress, using intervals similar to those of an accordion. He made the plot harmonious by connecting the narrative, and giving the heroine, Vera, a wonderful opportunity, which is enjoying her medical life with all its advantages and social status. Paulo describes, in this illustration of the privileged opportunity he gave to Vera, the nature of the accordion when it expands from the top, emitting its melodies, then narrows at the bottom. He also, on the darkest side of the story, where the accordionist shifts between the white and black keyboards of an accordion, deprived Vera of her daughter. Then, the playing begins, the sound of the accordion is heard, and the narrative becomes more complex.
Domino Effect
The game begins with the fall of the first piece and ends only with the creation of an art piece, because each domino piece was placed with utmost care in their correct places. Paulo believes that the scenario is the most important part of the cinematic process, unquestionably due to the fact that he was a writer before he became a director. This created the interweaved events, their progression in a rapid loop and their transmission. The narrative carried on from the events related to the daughter to the ones related to the husband, David, played by Álvaro Morte. Vera discovers, in the parallel journey, that her husband is none other than one of her patients on whom she had performed an operation. Paulo then returns to interweaving the plot, showing a flashback where Vera sees a picture of her husband with another woman named Ursula, who, with the falling row of dominoes, appears to be his wife. The reveal of events continues with the falling of other pieces of domino, where the movie flashbacks to the same previous scene showing the matches bearing the “Arabesco” logo just to expose the betrayal of her husband, or the husband of the other woman, Ursula, in this incident with her friend, the nurse, Monica!
Where is the Boy?
The audience are preoccupied with the complexity and the rapid pace of events in the movie, however, they still search for the boy among the events when the dominoes fall nonstop, and for a moment they believe themselves to be inspectors eager to reach a deduction, which they might later discover to be right or wrong. The boy appears in the parallel life dead, showing the other side of the story where the killer neighbor and his motives are revealed, starting with his wife’s determination to travel to Germany, where the Wall falls. The dominoes follow theWall and the fall, only to set off a chain of events, such as when Paulo gave the neighbor – i.e., the killer and owner of the Brito slaughterhouse – the space to betray his wife with his neighbor. Further, the sequence of these linked events continues to occur, as we return to the beginning of the story where the wife was killed and the involvement of the unfaithful neighbor, the mother of Nico’s friend, is revealed by throwing her watch in the crime scene, perhaps to return to it later, and so on in circles that connect the story’s threads.
The Director/The Exit
The interference of the screenwriter/director Paulo is the only solution for Vera to get her daughter back. In order for Vera to reach her daughter, Paulo sets obstacles for her to overcome, just like the domino pieces, starting with uncovering the crime, disclosing the location of the body, and unraveling the inspector/supporting character. These events have been scripted in an effort for Vera to escape and continue her discovering journey, to discover the identity of the inspector, and to bet between two things; neglecting his love that she discovered in a parallel life or returning to her daughter where she continues her journey, but at what cost?
The Price of Sacrifice
A question arises about the daughter, is she a sacrifice imposed by the director on Vera in order for Nico to live? Does her life correspond to his life, so only one of them lives?
The movie’s journey began with Vera in the middle of the train journey in search of her daughter in an effort to get her back, and nothing else. Will the tape go back to the event where the car runs over the boy in order for her daughter to return? Or does Paulo have other routes that both Vera and Nico can take without losing anyone?
Or does Paulo think that the Alternative sacrifice is to sacrifice of another just to let whoever he wants live? But the question emerges, would Vera have accepted offering her daughter as a sacrifice if she had known? And for a boy she doesn’t even know, to live? Does she have this courage? What will Paulo do? Does he have another offering? Or is the concept of sacrifice no longer a condition in anyone’s valuable life?
Paulo has many loops and more assumptions, and as long as the journey is on paper, he can set the stops and let his heroes ride the trains he wants.
Real Life or a Dream?
The matter is exceedingly difficult when it comes to life and death, and therefore it is necessary to verify the truth behind everything happening. The audience are stuck between two things: either believing the events as real life, or referring the matter to a dream, as the easiest gateway to interpreting complex events.
Some audiences are skeptical about time travel, and they assume that scientists only accept facts and evidence. Later on, the matter of time travel turns into questioning the dream and believing it to be a reality, and from here begins the real skepticism when Nico mentioned to his mother that he had a dream without being asleep, followed up by asking his friend Aitor:
“Do you believe in time travel?”
The question seems very reasonable, Nico is ought to believe in this concept for he has suffered and lived after facing death! Contrasting the perspective of the sixty-year-old Saleh Al-abdullah who described the situation in the film “Spoiler” to the thirty-year-old as a realistic falling dream, moving on to say, “Let us consider tonight a dream and believe what is in it.”
It is then an invitation for the audience who believe and do not believe in time travel, to make an exception for one night.
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