Films look at variations on themes
Groundhog Day, Run Lola Run and more
Constellations isn’t the first drama to play around with the notion of narrative spinning off into a multitude of parallel possibilities. It’s a trick that itself has been subject to endless repetition and variation, with explanations ranging from the existence of multiverses, conflicting memories, or confinement in some indefinable purgatory.
The latter is very much the case in Waiting For Godot, the repetitious second act of which led to the famous description of it being a play where nothing happens, twice. Purgatory is also perhaps the explanation for the endless re-boots that hapless weatherman Phil finds himself undergoing in Groundhog Day, a movie classic that has itself been re-booted recently in the form of a West End musical.
Another musical that enmeshes its protagonist in parallel possibilities is If/Then, which, like the movie Sliding Doors, uses the “bifurcated plot” device of positing two outcomes diverging from a chance happening. (Sliding Doors, incidentally, with its “missed/caught train” premise, is suspiciously close to an earlier film from Polish maestro Krzysztof Kieslowski, Blind Chance).
The Canadian mathematician and playwright John Mighton drew on his scientific knowledge to create the quantum noir thriller Possible Worlds, in which the victim of a brain-stealing serial killer finds himself meeting variations of the same woman in a series of parallel realities (it was subsequently filmed by Robert Lepage). In the multi-award-winning Copenhagen, Michael Frayn combined the supernatural and quantum physics to create multiple versions of the meeting between physicist Niels Bohr and would-be father of the Nazi atomic bomb, Werner Heisenberg.
Cinema, with its potentially rich pickings from the cutting room, hasn’t been slow to exploit the potential of the narrative reset button. As well as the aforementioned examples, we’ve had Franka Potente’s thrice-told mad dash in Run Lola Run, Jake Gyllenhaal given multiple opportunities to prevent a terrorist attack in Source Code, and Tom Cruise enduring a kind of trial-by-karmic-rebirth so that he can evolve into an alien-smashing super-soldier in Edge of Tomorrow.
But narrative re-set doesn’t necessarily need a complex scientific explanation. It can simply be a case of conflicting memories. In this year’s Montreal Fringe, a fun little drama called Atomic City seemed to draw on both Harold Pinter and Copenhagen by having its protagonists replay events with variations in an attempt to discover whose recollections were most reliable.
And then repeated action in a narrative might simply exist as a kind of public acting exercise, as seemed to be the case in last year’s FTA show Eternal, which had two actors offering endless variations on a snatch of dialogue from the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As anybody who endured that one might agree, that really did feel like being trapped in an indefinable purgatory.