Movie: Timeless
Director : Susan Mey Lee Lim, Samudra Kajal Saikia, Christina Teenz Tan
” There is not love of life without despair about life.” ~ Albert Camus
“Timeless” is a story about relationships and existence from the perspective of an apparently inanimate object. The movie deals with how differently a relationship is perceived and understood by the ones that according to human beings are sterile, ones who do not possess consciousness, the ability to separate right from wrong. However, these perceptions of the inanimate object, its angst, his fears and reassurances appear more profound than the ones felt by mortals. As human beings ties and emotions are bound by tangibility and time.
For the inanimate, relationships transcend the pangs of the all-devouring time. They exist in the safe abode of memory. This thought induces in us a sense of universality. A couple walking hand in hand through the rasping streets of Egypt would see themselves in the kingdom of the great Tutankhamun or listening to the preachings of The Buddha.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote :
” It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.” Therefore the anguish of a mortal would not be very different from that felt by the inanimate. Similarly, the change of seasons signifying transience would still baffle him and he would refuse to let go of his memories, the moments now lost in the ravages of time would exist somewhere deep within the inanimate. The animate believes it when he claims ” We are timeless”. The thought of universal existence is a profound one. We exist in some place or the other all the time. As someone said in the play “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett:
” But at this moment, at this point of time all mankind is us whether we like it or not.”
Mortals are not very different to the inanimate in that regard. They want to believe that they are timeless too. Their defiant selves want to live through memories in a place where all conventional definitions melt into insignificance like Salvador Dali‘s painting (The persistence of memory) used in the movie.
The composer (Ron Josef Danziger) and the lyricist ( Christina Teenz Tan) must be credited for the beautiful song in the movie.
The attempt by the makers of trying to add a concrete sense of universality to emotions must be appreciated. In an age where we are desperate to prove how we are different, Timeless tells us how we can connect to things that are apparently inanimate in our times of despair and tell them our stories as they might know what we are going through better than ourselves as they felt that way all their lives (from the time they are made till the time they are rejected).
