Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes has great patience in setting up its jigsawed genre workout: we watch a bald, schlumpy, bulbous-nosed, non-hero-type fellow return to a vacation home, noodle about trying to nap, catch a passing glimpse through his binoculars of a naked woman, and wander into a loopy, neatly-closed loop of a time-travel plot. The dreamlike quality of the first thirty minutes had me enthralled: each crazy event led to the next, and our hero Hector never stops to think through what X and Y means–he just sees X, and assumes that therefore Y must follow. (If we ever stop to think too substantively about the choices most characters are making, I think the whole thing fizzles. But, like a dream, if you just keep wandering along, it makes perfect sense.)
Quite enjoyable. I think Primer was nuttier and neater, but also far knottier, and Timecrimes is remarkably lucid if utterly improbable in its plotting. But I urge you to rent it so that you can pull up from the extras a short film by Vigalondo called “7:35 in the Morning,” which works a small miracle on the improbability of song-and-dance numbers. A woman wanders into a cafe for breakfast, where the regulars fail to respond to her greeting and seem strangely quiet…. and then a man bursts from behind a pillar singing the title song, to which everyone in the joint joins. The reason for such behavior neatly reframes our engagement with the musical number, teases out the creepy and uncanny tone underlying most musical numbers — and it’s funny, smart, and well-shot. Great little short.
I missed something during Hector 2’s journey that made me uncertain as to what happened when Hector 3 put the roadside, bike-riding woman in his wife’s red coat. So the closing of the loop left me scratching my head a bit.
Also, would you argue the film provides a critique of the male gaze or would you say the film ultimately punishes the woman for being a spectacle text in the first place (or even an object of potential spectacle)?
I thought Timecrimes to be something of a dark comedy which made the ending (the restoration of the world as it should be) even harder to negotiate.
In other words (and I’m not calling you out for not responding, but simply thinking aloud), do you think Hector does what he must do in the end in order to save his marriage from his own desires?
Sorry! Been busy–at school, and at home. (Guests.)
I am intrigued by your reading … but not sure if it works for me. What do you make SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER of the earlier scene, where his wife comes upon Hector 1, he drops the phone, she pushes him back to–make love? He seems such a strange slug of a man in those first few scenes; I still don’t know what to make of his entry, driving up to the house with a trail of garden supplies falling out of the car. Then he wanders off to nap, but is unable to… Perhaps you’re right; perhaps this is (yet another) story about a man tugged out of his marriage by his own foolish, destructive desires — then returning to that safe home, but at the cost of the other woman. Actually, spelling it out that way, there’s no subversion whatsoever. It’s Fatal Attraction, but with time loops.
Hm. That makes me like it a little less, maybe. (What I loved about the short was its explicit attention to the creepiness, the violent threat of “romance” in the fantasies of musical-comedy/romance. There’s something subterranean and creepy in Hector, too.)
Make the case, my man, make the case: I’m interested to hear more about why you saw more dark disruption (for most of its running time).
Thanks for the recommendation. I enjoyed ‘Timecrimes’ a lot, especially the first 40 minutes. It begins to collapse after that under the pressure of holding all three Hectors together, and I just got lost at the end. What happened to Hector 1? And the time machine operator? What I particularly liked was that all three Hectors have different personalities. One is a bumbling fool. Two is scheming and has no compunction to murder. Three is world weary, and self-reflective, though he too is willing to sacrifice the woman on the bicycle to save his wife.