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Of mice and time-travelers. Borges prefaces "The Secret Miracle" with a quote from the Quran: "And God made him die during the course of a hundred years and then He revived him and said: 'How long have you been here?' 'A day, or a part of a day,' he replied." The office drone (Claude Rich) botches his suicide and emerges from the clinic medicated and sluggish but still a smartass, off to the secret research center he goes, "a place that doesn't even exist yet." In deadpan chunks of sci-fi argot that gradually reveal a lampoon of Fantastic Voyage, the experiment is outlined. The time-machine is an oversized pincushion-pumpkin contraption locked underground, something of a camera obscura, too—the human lab rat steps inside, collapses into a beanbag chair, and recalls, projects, suffers the narrative. "Awake in his sleep" is the condition, back one year for the span of one minute until things go awry and the head trip dilates into a stuttering tour of an unglued consciousness. Alain Resnais and le temps, contemplating the human condition in fragmented shots that return helplessly to the image of the self in a glass cage, gasping for air. The girlfriend (Olga Georges-Picot) who wonders if cats were made in God's image, erasers but no pencils on the desk, swimming and drowning. A bed cozily occupied and then vacant, flashes of the mind when words won't do, dreams. Allergic greens, persistent blues. "Are psychoses red?" "No, the future is red." A near-abstract quilt of echoing lines and harmonies, just a breakdown of the senses attuned to the breakdown of a romance. Altogether dazzling, virtually unseen, immensely influential. "That minute runs away but I chase it." Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy renders tribute to the greeting-card gag. Cinematography by Jean Boffety. With Anouk Ferjac, Alain MacMoy, Vania Vilers, Ray Verhaeghe, Van Doude, Claire Duhamel, and Bernard Fresson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |