Philip Goes Directing

When I arrived at the screening place in Soho to watch this movie, I found a dusty old frontage with a dog weeing on the front doorstep. I mopped at the window with my cuff and peered inside. There sat the seats, there was the screen, tattered and torn. I felt an icy hand on my shoulder and turned to find an elderly gent.
“There hasn’t been a cinema there for fifty years.” He said. I realized that I had been caught in some kind of time-warp.

Excellent, I thought, this is the perfect place to watch (have watched?) a movie which is about time: about the unnerving passage of time; about the aggressive qualities of time; about the occasional and almost (almost) supernatural layering of present and future.

Hoffman has said that, simply, this film is about the admission that “if I fall in love with you, I need to be prepared for pain.” This is a peculiarly Calvinist statement. Beneath it lie that deeply Calvinist rhythm: the “doom, doom, doom” of a big bass drum.

Jack is a guy who lives in the future. This is a point which Hoffman hammers home a little too determinedly, but its an interesting point, so we’ll forgive him for it. Jack spends the whole film waiting for summer, waiting to be able to swim, waiting to be able to cook the perfect soufflé for his date. Jack’s done so much waiting that he’s found himself old, when he was once young. The action of the film is set in a period in Jack’s life when the future starts invading the present.

Good things come towards him, out of the future: The girl who he’s waiting for, steps up the pace. The job that he’s waiting for, lands on his doorstep. But bad things come out of the future also: He has a very intelligently staged vision of the relationship that lies ahead of him; the perfect, future, soufflé which lies in the future, emerges from the oven burnt to a crisp. Jack reacts badly. The brilliant climax has the idea of rape (the most potent and immediate occasion of future invading present) being tamed by a triumphant Jack.

It’s all handled with a fair amount of aplomb. Hoffman shambles through the film with his typical charm and charisma. There are some concerns about the romanticism of his image of working class life in America. But this is a movie of pulsing, absorbing rhythms, which draws you in and spits you out, once every twenty minutes or so. It is an excellent debut. It is a grand idea, masked with humility and cosiness. Which we like.