This was certainly one of the more thought-provoking films that I’ve seen in awhile. Made in a sort of magical realist style, the film tells the story of an aging Romanian professor Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) who miraculously becomes rejuvenated after being struck by lightning.
The backdrop of the film is WWII, though tha tdoesn’t relaly play a huge part in the movie itself. Matei is a brilliant polylingual linguist (what a mouthful!) that, were he alive today, would be some kind of Steven Pinker-esque linguist in that he’s interested in the beginnings of human language and consciousness, and his life work is to go back all the way to the source on his way to finding a unified theory. But that’s actually just my inference, the movie doesn’t dwell too much on this. Suffice it to say that Matei is a Faustian figure who gives up the love of his life for the sake of his work. However, towards the end of life, he feels pessimistic–the movie starts with him claiming that he might never finish his life’s work.
So when he gets struck by lightning, something strange happens. His Faustian bargain, made with no one in particular, sees him reverse-aging, becoming younger. And as he becomes younger, not only does his hair come back and his stoop disappear–his neurons start firing like they used to, and he remembers everything that he’d ever studied. OK, but that still doesn’t bring him closer to his goal, but it does give him a second chance–a new life, in a way–to complete his goal. This, of course, is what everyone wants–a new life without becoming a new person. It’s you with all the benefits (your memories, your knowledge, your life experience) minus all the baggage that comes with being who you are being held responsible for it.
However, he does pay a price for his new lease on life: he finds out that he has a double, a Fight-Club type shadow that doesn’t seem too devious but does have a tendency to egg him into thinking and doing things he normally might not. The love of his life married someone else and died young, but one day in the midst of his new life he sees her again, or at least someone that is her spitting image. However, she gets struck by lightning as well, but instead of becoming younger she regresses in another way: by becoming the person she was in former lives. She begins with becoming some kind of ancient Indian contemplative and babbling in an ancient Indian language. Of course, they are skeptical because this would mean that there are past lives and the transmigration of souls is real, but yes, they confirm it’s true.
Matei communicates with her past selves, recording and studying what they say. Thus, the new incarnation of his lover is able to do what the old one could not–help him realize his ambition of discovering the origins of language. She does this by regressing farther back in time everytime, but it wears down her body, until one day she finds that the opposite of what happened to Matei is happening to her: she is getting far older–soon, despite being the physical age of 25 she looks a haggard 50. Matei is convinced it is his work, these regressions into past lives–that is wearing her out so he leaves her, thinking that her youth will return as soon as she’s freed of her burden.
There are some interesting ideas and tropes in the movie. For example, the contrast between his fate and hers. He gets to live his life twice, as it were, but needs a double in order to sustain this unnatural “second life.” In fact, the two are inseparable–the double, call it his shadow or id or whatever–is the source of his will and actions. The woman, on the other hand, also gets to live other lives, but instead of traveling in a loop within the same life, she travels linearly back in time to past lives. You could say that their lives are moving in “orthogonal” directions. On the other hand, they both connote a kind of immortality: he is, like a vampire, immortal in the sense of being locked in the same state, for eternity, whereas she is immortal because while the body perishes, the soul drifts uninterrupted through human history.
The idea of transmigration of an eternal soul is ancient, primordial idea from way back, from the collective unconscious. That is what the girl represents, and tries to regress to. Matei, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the modern scientific spirit. His unconscious is not the collective unconscious but rather the individual unconscious, the one discovered by Freud. His disinterested search for truth takes him to the limits of human knowledge–and, as one might expect, it is a border that he cannot broach.
When he destroys his double using the obvious symbolism of the smashed mirror, he ends up turning old again, because whatever it was that sustained him is in fact now gone. He becomes old and dies…but there’s a bit of a trick ending here (spoiler alert). When he goes one of his old haunts, he tells his old buddies about how much life has changed since the late 1930s, when he last saw them–but they say, in fact, it is still the late 1930s, and all the events that Matei has seen, from the end of the second world war to the landing of the first astronaut on the moon they have never heard of. Throughout the movie, Matei talks about the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and the dream of the butterfly, a cliche that has been used to death in the movies, and this one is no exception: Matei always mentions it and it seems hokey until the end, when you realize that perhaps he never left the 1930s, and that he never got struck by lightning and became young. Of course, how he managed to dream up Neil Armstrong and the end of the War is another matter, but there is the chance that yes, he was just dreaming the whole thing.
This kind of film is not for everyone, but I do think that films like this are worth watching, they do make you think a bit more and the premise is, of course, quite interesting–none of the individual tropes and ideas are new, but the way they are woven together is intruguing. The story is based on the novel by the writer Mircea Eliades. And here’s a link to what Manohla Dargis wrote about the film in the NY Times.
