Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea (1977) 90m
The paradoxes of time travel are well known in popular culture, courtesy of not only the movies but also Ray Bradbury's economical short story 'A Sound of Thunder', which made public the concept of altering the present by altering the past. Hence the idea of encountering our past selves has now been explored in everything from serious sci-fi to comedies like BACK TO THE FUTURE and BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE. Combining this paradox with that old time-travel saw, "what if you could go back in time and kill Hitler?", this idea behind this modestly-budgeted Czech SF is that a group of revolutionaries in the future make a plan to break the safety protocols of Time-Travel Sightseeing Holidays so they may alter the course of World War II. The twist is that these guys are not out to put an end to Hitler, but to give him the hydrogen bomb and help the Axis powers win the war (screenwriter Josef Nesvadba had already covered the flip side of this idea in an earlier Czech SF film, in which a group of activists return to the past to kill Einstein and prevent the bomb from ever being built).
The future in Czechoslovakia looks suspiciously like 1977 and there's very little in the way of futuristic gadgets or dramatic societal changes apart from the convenient plot device of anti-ageing pills (FX budget so far: one bottle of aspirin) but the film-makers aren't about to apologize for that - their story is about ideas, not visual effects. In TOMORROW, the concerns of the characters are just as mundane as the same ones people have always had: not having enough money, finding the right girl to marry, holding on to a job, etc. Karel (Petr Kostka) is a 'time tourism' rocket pilot who goes about his missions as if he were making domestic flights between cities. The tourists treat it just as casually ("Oh, look Patrick, there's Hitler!") which perhaps creates a futuristic ambience just as convincing as those flamboyant cityscape FX we've seen in bigger movies. After all, the future isn't that awesome to anyone actually living in it. At first, the development of TOMORROW looks to be the standard blueprint for any time travel story: characters venture into the past, deal with a bit of temporal shock (as opposed to culture shock), have an adventure, and then return. The adventure, however, ends halfway through the film, after which the second half of the film plays around with the first half. It has neat touches without trying to be too clever, and manages to tie the loose ends up in a way that wouldn't be possible in other movies.
If TOMORROW has anything wanting, it is a sense of pace that would show off the farcical elements inherent in any story involving time travel AND a womanizing twin brother. Compare, for example, the energy of the BACK TO THE FUTURE films which use similar ideas but are aided with tight editing, lively performances and exciting musical scores. TOMORROW is cut more like a TV show than a movie, and the irresistibly cheesy music makes it seem like Sci-Fi for lounge lizards - a clear indication that Nesvadba and director Jindrich Polak were more interested in the comic side of their subject rather than the science-fictional. Perhaps it's the low-key approach to the humor in this film that makes one scene more pointed than it would have been had the story taken itself more seriously: the visitors from the future show Hitler newsreel footage of the fall of the Third Reich, and he watches the disastrous retreat from the Russian Front and the destruction of Dresden with utter bewilderment. Would we, in the same position, consider destiny as already written? Kostka accepts that some events are preordained - he knows he will once again scald his arm with tea after he has been returned to the previous day - but that doesn't stop characters in the story from trying to fix up their past mistakes and more often than not create new ones in their place. After all, as Marx said, history repeats itself; the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.
sburridge@hotmail.com
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