Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (3)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 September 2011

* Contains spoilers *

To say a little more, enough to tease (as the film often does), about mirror-images, there is a scene that shows Stephen and his friend Victoria after they have tumbled to the ground in a sort of chase of and with themselves.

As with something that happens later, which may (as Stephen's cousin Conrad first claims, and later appears unsure about it) - or may not - have been an accident, and which literally ties in with this moment, there is an embodiment of a skein, of the film's title's 'tangle of threads' (or the potential for it). It's a game, but there's bondage, the shackling that Joyce McKinney asserts was a sort of chosen cure, a sort of healing, in Tabloid, and with it there's the breathlessness associated with the other activity, there's the arbitrary rule-making that the game has to be played one way (counter-clockwise), an approach that can form rigid habits and stronger disciplines, not always for one's - or anyone else's - good in life (as with Stephen's father's former friend Richard?).

So the mirror-image, of the game being played transposed into a clockwise motion, can be imagined - as can any other action involving Victoria and Stephen - happening, but it offends against the street being declared to be one way. (Not too far off from thinking again of Rutherford, of thinking how the characters in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen revolve, dance, around each other like particles in a simple atom...)

And the transposed image, the left / right flip? Set aside whether the falling down together, linked, was (as with Conrad's accident) deliberate - although it had to seem so, or not ambiguously so, for us: when we see Stephen and Victoria on the ground, from the waist up, side by side, they are, first of all, in that order, left to right. The picture (taken by the cinematographer, but not one that otherwise existed for Stephen to see (directly)), when he calls it to mind later, becomes Victoria and Stephen, she now on the left.

(It is nearly summoned again, but we do not actually see it, are just so reminded of it that, as a ghost of a view, we could almost swear that its image is on our retina at that point, because we know it - or think that we know it - by then.)

So these are the hints of Alice, these are the suggestions that, in a world as like ours as the one that she first sees in Looking-Glass House, things may be subtly different, actually harmful: as The Annotated Alice observes, with Martin Gardner talking about left- and right-handed molecules (which are identical but for being mirror-images of each other), milk would not be safe for Alice or her cat to drink in the world beyond the looking-glass. Matter and anti-matter? It goes on...

Where would we be without the imagination of Ant Neely (the film's writer) or of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (really Lewis Carroll, or vice versa)? The poorer for it, I think.


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Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (2)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 September

Here, now (wherever 'here' and 'now' actually are), are the 500 words that have been submitted to the Festival web-page for Dimensions and, as a comment on a piece about the film in Cambridge News, to that newspaper / web-site:


Although it is received wisdom that ‘I can’t be in two places at once [or at the same time, in a variant]’, not only is that usually just an excuse, but it also might not stand up to examination in the light of developments in cloning.

All that apart, more or less, the immense popularity of Dimensions, which has seen it (after having screenings in Screens 2 and then 1) shown again this afternoon meant that I could go through the wormhole of watching again: I know that the phrase does not sound favourable, but this is my review, and I am in a whimsical mood, in no way intended to detract from viewing twice to see what happened to something that I thought fine the first time.

Why did I think it fine? It is an extremely intelligent film that uses the concept and theory of time-travel to say something about what I described in my Festival blog as longing. I still think that it is longing, not just obsession – I think that one can be obsessed about something (e.g. my head being cut off by Jackie Chan) that (unless we are being psychoanalytical), on the face (pun intended!) of it, one does not long for, and long for something that does not obsess one.

I said that it is longing for something that one cannot have or that may not do me any good. In this film, that turns out not to be true on either count, and also to involve a paradox. The events are separated by a period of fifteen years, but, in some respects, the characters seem unchanged, seem stuck in some childish ways (as we all probably are – now who wants to play the psychology card, after all!), seem full of what I want to call longing. (I call it longing not only because I can’t use the German word Sehnsucht, and, because of the connotations, I don’t want to use yearning.)

I asked a question about that at the premiere – the younger actors had had a chance to speak to their counterparts (and vice versa). What I find myself thinking, this time around, is that there is a generational as well as a dimensional character to all that we see, a temporal distortion that, as much as Alice’s worlds reinterpret the present from which she enters Wonderland or the other Looking-Glass House, ripples (a key word in the script) as water, particles or time do with their differing wave-fronts. Which is why Ant Neely’s brother’s house on the river at Cambridge is such a benefit to and feature of this film.

This Cambridge-driven film – Ernest Rutherford split the atom here in 1917, which was then done under both his direction and controlled conditions in 1932 - buzzes with that innovation, but buzzes in the direction of feelings, and Olivia Llewellyn’s acting beautifully embodies the spirit of a bright and clear academic mind, seeking to help Henry-Lloyd-Hughes (as Stephen) achieve his brilliant aims.


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