In the palindrome, beyond the impulse of the game, perhaps resides the certainty, or only intuition, that the word (or phrase) is always the archetype of the thing itself. Hence its vocation as a mirror. What if, as so many poets imagined, each of the letters that make up the word 'ocean' contained all the seas of the planet? ' Tenet ', Christopher Nolan's latest outrageous swagger, is exactly that: the exact center of the multipalndrome known as Sator Square (see end); an excessive palindrome that, like the delirious collection of palindromes in 'Efímero I cried my faith' (by Gilberto Prado Galán) or as 'gold' or as 'We are or we are not'or how, why not, 'A la gorda drógala' , contains in its reversible and reflective skin the model or archetype of everything that gives it meaning: the cinema recovered as a spectacle; cinema turned into a game, a hieroglyph, a mystery; the cinema claimed as an absurdly playful and timeless exercise; cinema as labyrinth and wonder. To!
If you like, and to start at the beginning which is also the end, the whole film is based on the most elementary of the tricks that the cinematographer discovered for himself: the possibility of making time run backwards. In the same way that the train enters the Ciotat station, it is enough to turn the crank in the opposite direction to see it return to its place of origin, which, suddenly, is the destination. Chaplin planned a good part of his most accurate strikes by causing the random movement of an ax or a sledgehammer to start (not fall) from the exact site of his objective: just a millimeter from his own head. The surprise derived from a trick precision. Jean Cocteau used and even abused the camera backwards to compose his most beautiful delusions in 'Beauty and the Beast' from the fire that instead of consuming nothing created everything. And so, yes there is.
'Tenet' imagines the story of a spy, or something much more serious, dedicated to saving humanity from an impending apocalypse. A very flexible John David Washington in the skin of a grieving James Bond has to stop the almost self-parodic plans of Kenneth Branagh determined to imitate himself. And that, the truth, is bad from wherever you look: from the beginning or from the end. The entire universe will perish because, as in 'Momo', it can be left without that which was so difficult to define for Saint Augustine himself: without time, without future and without past at the same time. The villain possesses the key to the infernal machine capable of so much. Our hero, accompanied by Robert Pattinson and secretly in love with Elizabeth Debicki (all adjusted to the gravity of the matter), must therefore prevent the clocks from stopping. Before, of course, it will drive the hands back and forth crazy.
And so far, a synopsis that barely takes charge of a magnificent inextricable labyrinth where everything admits a double reading ; another point of view; a nice, timeless and graceful loop in ' rewind '. Despite the efforts of all the characters to explain to viewers what exactly is happening, it seems completely impossible to orient oneself to an argument that is the opposite of the obvious. And that's what it's all about: getting lost, doubting, enjoying being lost in its broadest sense. But pay attention, and hence the miracle, everything fits (or almost).
The action scenes go from front to back and back to front at the same time and without a solution of continuity (or discontinuity, depending on how you look at it). Everything is seen twice in opposite directions simultaneously, alternately or in both ways at the same time. In fact, everything is modality and modularity, which also exists. And it is there, in the palindromic excess of opposite directions where the film explodes before the view of a spectator (outside of cynicisms) by force happy in bewilderment.
If you like, the film can be seen as a necessary consequence of that first attempt to tell a backwards story that the director rehearsed in ' Memento ' (2000). That or as a variation of his recurring studies of time and the alterations of consciousness that run through his always pompous filmography from the first-time ' Following ' (1998) to ' Origin ' (2010), ' Interstellar ' (2014) or ' Dunkerque '(2017). Nolan insists on decomposing time as an algorithm for understanding both the entire universe and cinema itself. It is time that makes us different in each evolutionary leap (in each encounter with the Kubrick monolith in '2001'), we are something else. Humanity is thus the only one that, in its domain of temporal paradoxes, can become an extraterrestrial of itself. That's ' Interstellar ': "They are us." When Cooper communicates with his daughter from the other side of the mirror, from the frontier of a new possibility of life, he only recognizes and makes effective the only enigma at least as incomprehensible as time itself: love. We have arrived.
And it is in these space-time coordinates so to speak that ' Tenet ' is offered again and again, backwards and forwards. If to date we had experienced time travel as a miraculous acrobatics at the controls of any Delorean, now what matters is the journey itself, the journey always reversed, towards the past or the future depending on the place of the past or the future where let's put the present. In fact, chronology no longer matters but chronotopia. The spatio-temporal nuance as root and matrix of two indissoluble concepts is what is relevant. If they get lost, don't blame me.
Each of the action scenes (that's what it's all about, recapturing the fervor of the simple and most joyous rampage) are designed to violate the rules of action scenes. No ' superhero ' digital effects , not a single linear development of the din. Everything, it is clear, is likely to be even more confusing. The oneiric materiality of the unrepresentable occupies everything. From the invasive and underwater music signed by the Swedish Ludwig Göransson (who takes over from the always visceral Hans Zimmer) to the hypernaturalist photography of the now usual Hoyte van Hoytema or the emotional montage before only technical by Jennifer Lame (previously linked to names like Noah Baumbach's) compose an irresistible fresco close to hypnosis.
Let's just say, to summarize it a lot, that Nolan has done it again. Neither the confusion nor the useless excess of explanations of each character nor, it is fair to admit it, the poorly balanced melodrama with the son in the background that interrupts the frenzy are sufficient impediments to suffocate the miracle of an action that is done and undone in the very heart of the big screen (very big); at the very heart of one's gaze. And it does it like never before. Otherwise, passive-aggressive cinephilia as a derivative of necrophilia (like the dead as irrefutable) is, once again, in luck.
While eating the tail the uroboru, an animal close to the scaly dragon and undisguisedly ugly, realizes that every ending is a new beginning. Of that and that the only elegant way, and even sensible, to advance is not to move from the site. That is basically ' Tenet ', a palindrome determined to return to the cinema the grace of the most elemental of astonishment with the oldest of tricks; a palíndormo devoted to showing that the word is always the archetype of the thing itself. It's just cinema or, in Nolan's ideas, it's just the opposite of TV: lethal TV.
Note 1.
(And if the end of this whole world did not reside if not in our inability to understand that the factory time of self-exploitation that we have given ourselves is nothing more than the most obvious negation of time itself? The question is worth to feed postcovid self-referential analyzes and criticism of the present intuitive neoliberal capitalism. But this is charged separately.)
Note 2.
(The words SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA and ROTAS arranged one above the other form the enigmatic and multipalindromic Sator Square whose oldest example is located in the Roman ruins of Pompeii. TENET, in the center, forms a cross that is palindromic in any of the directions: from top to bottom, from back to front and backwards. The millennialism that returns.)
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