THE TIME TO DIE

         

Le Temps De Mourir, d. Andre Farwagi (1970)

This is a film all about time, but which, unlike most other films and TV shows, manages to respect it and use it in a responsible, adult manner. Here time is not plastic, mouldable, malleable, flexible, but inexorable, inevitable, inescapable. Time is a bastard, ladies and gentlemen, cross it at your peril.  

A time-warped whodunnit, the film begins with a collision between a horse, a beautiful girl and a metal tree which leads to a reel of futuristic video tape rolling down a hill and into the path of a sleeping man. The man and his colleague watch the film, only to find it is surveilance camera footage of their Boss being shot to death by an unknown, but (crucially) not unseen, assailant.

The Boss, however, is not dead: he is alive, well, and bullet hole free. He rapidly becomes obsessed with finding out what it all means: is it a fake, a prank, a collective hallucination, or a vision of the future? Is it already written, or can it be revised? Will intervention stop it, or hasten it? 

Everything about this film is cool: it reminds me of hip, controlled jazz - no squawking sax or atonal key pounding (I'm not averse to that, by the way, but this film is a masterpiece of restraint) - just a smooth, irresistible, intelligent groove - a head nodder, a finger clicker. It's all beautifully enigmatic, and just about makes sense if you mentally squint really hard.