. The camera was rarely static, almost always moving){kind=link}
I was almost immediately aware of the cinematography in Ulaa Salim’s Eternal (For evigt). The camera was rarely static, almost always moving, especially in closeups. Giving the film a very watchful and voyeuristic nature. It always felt like you were peering into the lives of the characters which was perhaps a very fitting and intentional technique because it paired well with the sci-fi element of the film that presented glimpses of roads not taken or that could be taken in a kind of The Family Man meets Arrival way.
The film is a romance, a low-fi near-fi sci-fi, and a disaster film, and it does a good job of balancing the three. It opens with a big unnatural disaster (caused by man-made climate change) and then we quickly get into the meet-cute of the central couple. But while the girl wants to live in the present, in the now, the guy is thinking of the future, with a goal of closing the fracture in the earth’s core that has opened. The relationship hits its inevitable doom when present and future collide when presented in the form of an unplanned pregnancy. The guy says they shouldn’t have a child now, they should wait. And that’s it. The pair go their separate ways.
And 15 years later through serendipity, like in all romance films, when he’s on leave from a mission, he hears her voice. And that would have been that. If it wasn’t for the visions he got from the fracture, visions of a son he never had with her… except when he goes to surprise her at another performance, he sees that son and realizes she never got the abortion.
I was down for his efforts to build a relationship with his son, on her terms, since they shared mutual interests. However, the way he went around demanding about it rubbed me wrong and just dripped of male entitlement. He said at one point that he was owed 15 years. He made a decision when he told her to go get an abortion that he didn’t want to be a father, if she had listened to him, there would have been no son. Now whatever reasons she had for not telling him she changed her mind, whether she felt that he would pressure her to go through with it, or that he might not pursue his dream and then resent her and their child, that was her choice. He’d already made his. If he hadn’t come back into their lives, he would have been unaware he ever had a son. He also had 15 years to even try to spark up their relationship again regardless of a child if he wanted to, and never made that choice.
However, what I will say is the sci-fi element where it presented the life not taken, is a good reminder to not only look forward and fight for the future but to remember to embrace and hold onto the joys of the present, the things that make life worth living. Because if life isn’t worth living, what future are you fighting for?
Eternal (For evigt) had its World Premiere at the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), it expands on the themes of a short film he did in 2012 (Ung for evigt).
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