Time-travel fantasy, with the bare minimum of snags and snarls in logic. A struggling London actor (Douglas Henshall), self-described as a "Marlon fucking Brando," sincerely regrets the infidelity and confession thereof -- the confession perhaps a bit more than the infidelity -- that came between him and his girlfriend of six years, who is now about to marry someone else. "If only I could go back," he muses aloud, a trite enough sentiment. But this expression of it conjures up, out of the fog, a pair of mystical junkmen who conduct the hero to his personal garbage dump of Things You Threw Away, and who send him back from there to a place in between the infidelity and the confession, with full memory of what happened last time. For all his resolve to straighten up and fly right, he is not at that point the most sympathetic of characters, and he becomes if anything even less so in his self-interested efforts to prevent his girlfriend from meeting and getting to know her future fiancé. The cleverness of the movie, slow to reveal itself, and nowhere hinted at in its twinkly Twilight Zone supernaturalism, now starts to assert itself. The girlfriend (Lena Headey) becomes less sympathetic herself, no longer an unaware victim but an active offender in her own right. And then another girl enters the equation, one with qualities the hero is slower to perceive than the viewer. (It's true that she wears glasses, but she is recognizable nevertheless as Penelope Cruz, and the hero perhaps loses a little more sympathy.) Each of the three principals, as well as a couple of lessers, emerges as a distinct individual, with his or her own place in the Grand Scheme, and the unseen figure of Fate heaves up as a larger presence than all the others put together, and something resembling wisdom creeps into the picture. The cleverness of the movie, to say it succinctly, is that the element of magic never denatures the element of life. With Mark Strong, Charlotte Coleman, and Elizabeth McGovern; written by Rafa Russo; directed by Maria Ripoll. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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