This was certainly one of the more thought-provoking films that I’ve seen in awhile. Made in a sort of magical realist style, the film tells the story of an aging Romanian professor Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) who miraculously becomes rejuvenated after being struck by lightning.
The backdrop of the film is WWII, though tha tdoesn’t relaly play a huge part in the movie itself. Matei is a brilliant polylingual linguist (what a mouthful!) that, were he alive today, would be some kind of Steven Pinker-esque linguist in that he’s interested in the beginnings of human language and consciousness, and his life work is to go back all the way to the source on his way to finding a unified theory. But that’s actually just my inference, the movie doesn’t dwell too much on this. Suffice it to say that Matei is a Faustian figure who gives up the love of his life for the sake of his work. However, towards the end of life, he feels pessimistic–the movie starts with him claiming that he might never finish his life’s work.
So when he gets struck by lightning, something strange happens. His Faustian bargain, made with no one in particular, sees him reverse-aging, becoming younger. Continue reading
a shameful waste of madhouse time 