film time crimes

A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.
- IMDb.com

As it happens, this smart, feisty thriller begins quite sedately. Hector sits on a lawn chair outside his country home surveying the nearby hillside through a pair of binoculars. But, catching sight of what appears to be a nude woman amidst the trees, he hikes up to investigate. When he’s attacked by a sinister figure wrapped in a grotesque, pink head bandage, Hector takes refuge in a laboratory atop the hill. He tries to elude the stalker by hiding in a peculiar scientific contraption, and moments later, he emerges--only to find that it’s hours earlier. But time has a lot in store for Hector.

Nacho Vigalondo, who directed the ingenious, Oscar-nominated short 7:35 in the Morning, has a great instinct for the aesthetic, moving effortlessly between a tense, disquieting atmosphere and a relentless, driving energy. But drawing from a tradition of more cerebral science fiction, his story of an ordinary man flung into circumstances far beyond his comprehension (and perhaps his control) is propelled by a deeper curiosity than genre antics alone will satisfy. Ever more desperate to decipher the web of cause and effect surrounding him, Hector becomes increasingly complicit in the very situation he’s trying to escape. Any physicist would tell him that the more you try to fix things, the more they fall apart. When you mess with time, you mess with nature.
–Sundance Film Guide

Pr: Eduardo Carneros, Esteban Ibarretxe, Javier Ibarretxe
CoP: Santi Camuñas, Jorge Gómez
Ci: Flavio Labiano
Ed: Jose Luis Romeu
ArD: Jose Luis Arrizabalaga, Biaffra
So: Roberto Fernández

Sundance 2008: Timecrimes

The Spanish thriller Timecrimes is in many ways a throwback to both classic whodunit mysteries and time-travel science fiction. Writer/director/co-star Nacho Vigalondo is certainly channeling Philip K. Dick with his singular plot line that quickly grows in complexity when the moral and logical conundrums of archetypal time-travel dilemmas come into play. The question is whether Timecrimes finds a unique voice within this well-explored genre.

The set-up is quite simple, Hector and Clara are settling in to their new country home. Surveying the surrounding forest with binoculars, Hector sees what appears to be a naked woman in the trees. He discreetly slips away to investigate while Clara is off on an errand. As Hector attempts to revive the woman, he is suddenly stabbed in the arm by a mysterious man whose head is covered in bandages. Terrified, Hector runs through the woods until he finds a strange laboratory, where he attempts to seek refuge.

This first act was by no means terrible, but a few logical missteps managed to throw off the rest of the film. For one thing, why didn't Hector run back to his house? It didn't seem to be very far away. When he then finds a seemly helpful fellow at the laboratory who coaxes him into hiding in a strange vat filled with white liquid, the time-travel mayhem is ready to begin. But when the classic "what happens if you meet your past self?" and "do not alter any past events!" tropes begin to play out, the logical flaws in the setup undermine the mind-twisting fun of the time-travel drama.

Normally I'm not a stickler for perfect logic in films. I'm willing accept irrational decisions made by characters for the sake of the plot. But I think the flaws in narrative causality in Timecrimes threw me off precisely because it's a time-travel movie, and as such it relies heavily on logic. I remember having heated, mind-bending debates with my brother about the logical intricacies of Back to the Future. Which is exactly the fun of these movies, they work like a brain teaser.

A few twists that were supposed to function as "ah-ha" moments revealed their mysteries too quickly, only to be followed by tedium as the revelation played out. By the final act of the film, when multiple Hectors are simultaneously thwarting one another, my willingness to play along with the mind-games ran out. I don't think Vigalondo tied up all the loose ends, but I honestly don't know. I don't have the will to try to figure it out.

Karina reported earlier that the remake rights for Timecrimes were picked up by United Artists. While I'm normally a see-the-European-original kind of guy, this may be good news. There's quite a bit to work with here. The perplexing and tense climax could work, if the characters had been better developed, and the logical kinks were ironed out. The remake could well measure up to tried and true time-travel films, but ultimately the script doesn't bring any surprising revelations to the genre.

Time Crimes could possibly be retitled The Idiot's Guide to Time Travel - which isn't a complaint or a put down of the movie. Hector is a hapless schlub who is moving into his new house; when we first meet him he's coming home from the store without having closed his car's hatchback, and has spilled everything he bought into the driveway. Hector seems to unwind by looking around through his binoculars, ostensibly at birds, but when he spies a hottie stripping in the woods a series of events unfold that lead to him stumbling on a secret time travel experiment and being warped back into his own recent past, where he soon learns about the dangers of paradoxes and the problems inherent with trying to outwit causality.

There's a lot to like about Time Crimes; it's a small movie, with just four characters (or more, if you count all of the time tripping iterations of Hector), but it's full of big science fiction ideas. It's also surprisingly funny... until it turns surprisingly dark. Hector begins the film as a bumbling doofus, but after experiencing the rigors of trying to mess with his own timeline he becomes more and more desperate and more and more willing to fulfill the crimes part of the film's title.

Writer, director and actor Nacho* Vigalondo masterfully plays with the audience's expectations and preconceptions; once the basic conceit of the movie is set up you think you know where it's all going, but what you thought would be the big reveal ends up being just another swerve in the movie's tightening spiral of chronology. The script is wonderfully economical but also plotted with weblike intricacy, making for a satisfying ride that also raises big questions about the very nature of time travel.

It's impossible not to be reminded of Primer while watching Time Crimes: both films are smaller efforts without much by way of special effects, and both are more interested in the complications and personal effects of time travel rather than in the whiz bang gee whiz let's go look at dinosaurs type of stuff. But unlike Primer, where the main characters are the engineers who created the time travel process, Time Crime's lead character is a bozo whose terrible choices slowly morph from comedic to horrifying.

Time Crimes was my first film at Sundance; here's hoping that the movie's excellence is a sign of things to come.

Note: Time Crimes is playing at Sundance with a short film called Advantage Satan, which is probably one of the great titles of all time. I imagine the short, which is about a tennis court haunted by the spawn of the devil, started with the title first and filled in the rest of the blanks, but what the filmmakers ended up with is effective and sort of delightful.

Hi. I'm Nacho Vigalondo. 30 years, I live in Madrid now, and I have studied and worked in the Spain all my life. I left college (a journalism career) when I started working. I became an Oscar Nominee thanks to the short film "7:35 in the Morning." That turned me into a feature director.

What initially attracted you to filmmaking? What other creative outlets do you explore?

I've been writing horror stories all my life. I've worked as an actor in short films and commercials, eating hamburgers in front of the camera, you know. I made some theater, some television. I worked as writer in the Spanish version of "Big Brother" (a gift for a sci-fi fan). And I acted as Norman Bates in a spookhouse. I think all of that leads you to what you finally become.

Have you made other films, and how did you learn about filmmaking?

I've learned by simply working in short films (both mine and other people's) as writer, actor, camera operator, everything. Growing up in my tiny town surrounded by mountains in the north of Spain , making movies didn't seem like an option. It was unthinkable. My first video short films were recorded before I knew that things like short film festivals existed. They were made just for laughs. I shot a mockumentary about the Andes cannibal tragedy. It had a lot of singing and dancing. I can see there's a documentary about this same event in Sundance. The circle closes itself. Everything turns more seriuous in your work when you find other people with your interests and the shape of things becomes more solid. My partners in my little Spanish production company, Arsenico Producciones (we make commercials, short films...) are friends I met in college. Borja Cobeaga, one of us, was an Oscar nominee two years after me! We couldn't believe our fortune.

What prompted the idea for this film and how did it evolve?

I love time travel, literary sci-fi, the crime stories from authors like James Cain... I loved the intimate appeal of making a film like the American Fritz Lang movies: few characters, few locations, and a deep crime logic. From there I added the time travel element, like those crazy novels from the sixties. And threw in a little softcore eroticism for good measure. Then I realized this would be a De Palma story with a time machine. How could I stop at this point??

Please elaborate a bit on your approach to making the film.

We tried to put together the inhuman complexity of a time travel paradox with the mundane, almost comical, reactions of average characters. Even the scientist guy is dazed most of the time. This is a very Spanish--or European--thing: confusion and uselessness in presence of the unknown. Karra Elejalde, the main actor is well known in Spain as a comedian. Barbara Goenaga hasn't been in much yet, but that won't be the case for long if I can help it.

We wanted to do a film with few elements, and played with aesthetics just to make it atemporal and abstract. One friend told me "you've made Tarkovski for teenagers." I love that! At the same time, I feel so close to Italian movies. This movie is not so far from the Giallo classic stuff. Or the British old science fiction television. "Day of the Triffids," all those cold and sinister serials.

"Timecrimes" director Nacho Vigalondo. Image courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in developing the project?

We shot the film without a Spanish distributor, and while that gives you freedom, it makes everything riskier. The movie doesn't follow any traditions in Spanish cinema, so companies didn't feel comfortable about its commercial prospects. Nowadays the situation may have changed, thanks to the awards we got in festivals such as Fantastic Fest in Austin, or SciencePlusFiction, in Italy . And being here, at Sundance. And, of course, the incredible reviews and exposure we're getting from Variety and websites like Twitch, Aint-it-cool, Cinematical and indieWIRE, of course. I'm so thankful. This movie is reaching Spain from abroad.

What are your specific goals for the Sundance Film Festival?

I'm looking forward to having a bunch of interviews up there--I want to meet people and work on setting up my next step in the movie bussiness. Who knows. At the same time, I'll try to enyoy the festival and the movies there as much as possible.

What are some of your recent and all time favorite films?

I was the perfect age and loved all the right things when Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene and showed the modern way to mix the genre and the auteur thing. He became our generational hero and we owe him so much. That being said, my all time favourite filmmakers are those who destroyed the barriers between arthouse and genre. Terence Fisher, Don Siegel, Mario Bava... I love filmmakers like Rob Zombie. He dares to shoot what seem like B-movies, but you can recognize his style in less than ten seconds.

How do you define success as a filmmaker?

Success in art is surviving doing stuff that would't exist if you didn't exist. I want "Timecrimes" to be enjoyable and to allow me to make more movies, that's it. Not necessarily big ones. I have a fistful of crazy ideas and novels to adapt. Making movies is an incredible gift, and I want to take advantage of it in the deepest way possible.

Do you have any other projects in the pipeline?

My most finished script right now is "The Ramp," a story about a guy that builds a giant ramp in order to make a car jump onto a UFO. It's a comedy, but somehow works as a melancholic and dark turn for us, the Amblin generation. I'm writting a zombie plot, an alien invasion one, a dark Polanski-esque erotic thing... I love to start from traditions and make unexpected and funny twists. That's the most exciting thing for me.

Please share your thoughts on the state of independent film today.

Independent movies shouldn't look like independent movies. "Independent" shouldn't be a style--only a way of financing. The independent film scene is healthy if there's diversity. In Spain , independent filmmaking can be very difficult (our market is so small and fragile). Here there are more possibilities, but things could always be better. For example, I heard Todd Solondz is having problems financing his next project. That's something that's very hard for me to wrap my head around.