Timecrimes (en Espanol - Cronocrimines)

It's a very long time since my friends and I organised a 'weird film night', but in that tradition stretching back several years we watched the low budget science fiction oddity Timecrimes on Tuesday evening - or in its original Spanish, Cronocrimines.  As indicated by the title, Timecrimes is a time travel film in which a simple man stumbles into a situation that makes no sense, then ends up travelling backwards in time half a day and committing a bunch of crimes.  The strange events of the day begin to make sense as he experiences them from a different point of view, and Hector (pictured) slowly learns more than he ever wanted to about himself and travelling in time.

Hector is a funny character.  He's a bit of an idiot who gets things wrong and bumbles around not understanding what's going on.  The film's quite funny because of him and doesn't feel like a lot of science fiction films where the characters get all worthy when they realise the cosmic enormity of what's happening to them.  Hector acts like he's never heard of time travel before the scientist guy running the time machine tells him not to disturb anything that happens during the day he's about to relive.  He then flips between doing everything he can to make the events of the day pan out precisely the way he remembers and trying to stop bad things happening.

The most interesting thing about Timecrimes is that the film is probably the only completely internally consistent time travel story I have ever seen.  By internal consistency  I mean that though as a viewer we experience events in the film multiple times (from the point of view of Hector), nothing actually changes.  Basically it would be possible to re-cut the film in strict chronological order and everything would still make sense.  The opening scene would be Hector emerging from the time machine and then we would see the day's events unfold as multiple versions of Hector run around doing things that only make sense once you know what happens in the future.

Though this seems like a fairly obvious concept, the fact that I can only think of time travel films in which a protagonist changes something about the past means that it must be novel.  The story challenges the typical human concept of causality, and idea that we are free to change and do what we like in the world.  After Hector travels back in time he spends ages trying to do things exactly like he remember seeing them earlier.  What would have happened if he had done things differently or deliberately tried to mess things up?  Perhaps the answer is that it's impossible to do things differently.  Does a world in which time travel is possible negate the concept of free will?  The film suggests that the idea of multiple worlds (so beloved by time travel story tellers who want to have their cake and eat it) is bunkum, and that time only happens 'once'.  If you travel in time you simply get to experience events from a different point of view.  Therefore the question 'what if Hector did things differently?' makes no sense, because events only happens once - free will as we think we understand it ceases to exist.

After the film ended a healthy but heated argument broke out between two groups of people in the room, those who agreed with me and those who thought the opposite.  The fact that this 85 minute long film with limited dialogue and a weirdo for a protagonist can generate such a high-brow debate is big kudos for it.  It comes to you recommended.