Possible Worlds
This week we’re presenting Possible Worlds (2000) on Tuesday, September 2nd, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the film at 7:10! PLEASE NOTE: We are switching back to 7 PM as the sun sets inescapably earlier and school is back in session for the teachers in the audience with early bedtimes. Also, it’s on a Tuesday this week!
One more piece of business before I introduce the movie: we are prospectively planning one more From Below BBQ for the summer, which is tentatively scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, September 14th, just so you can get it sketched onto your calendar. We’ll maybe even screen a movie very dear to my heart later that evening, to bid adieu to my 31st year of life. Stay tuned!
It’s only fitting, with school bells ringing and the smell of freshly sharpened pencils in the air, that we return for another installment of ADVANCED TILDA STUDIES. For this installment, we’ll take a seminar in quantum theory and advanced mathematics with Robert Lepage’s mindbending multiversal romantic drama Possible Worlds. Even though I invoke multiverses, this film is much more akin to Primer (or even the downtempo deliberation of Tarkovsky) than it is to the cornball effervescence of Everything Everywhere All At Once. In it, Tom McCamus stars as George Barber, a man who, through his brain’s processing of math problems, has discovered a way to experience all of his parallel lives at once, finding his way to Tilda Swinton’s multivalent Joyce across the diverging threads of his possible selves. Across scenes that play somewhere between Charlie Kaufman and Wong Kar-Wai, the two try to understand what it means to have a connection to another person. Meanwhile, a serial killer is harvesting brains from his victims for mysterious, most likely dubious purposes. It’s a film that contains multitudinous multitudes, one that you’ll probably be mentally racing to keep up with upon first viewing.
Robert Lepage was not a director I was super familiar with before embarking on Advanced Tilda Studies, but his background as a master playwright and director of Canadian theatre lends himself to the source material; Possible Worlds is an adaptation of a play by John Mighton, himself a Canadian mathematician (who among other things, served as the math consultant on Good Will Hunting and revolutionized Canadian elementary school math education). It also further confirms Tilda’s preternatural proclivity for finding interesting and unintuitive collaborators on her projects.
From this Reality,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark