Love Is Strange

It would be difficult and almost pointless to write about my weekend. The first two days I spent at my father's, after a month-long break, and nothing really happened. On Monday my boyfriend stayed with us. We had a lot of liverwurst sandwiches (melegszendvics), and watched A púpos (Le bossu), a French period piece with no characters, no motivation, and no drama at all. On Tuesday we had a 30 minutes' gig with the orchestra at the local plaza. We started at 11.30 am, just the hottest part of the day, between two performances of a local group of elderly ladies. The four days could be best summarized as being extremely hot. (Can Hungary still be described as having four seasons?)
Today was my first working day of the week. Heat again. The best part was that in the evening I was at my boyfriend's. We ate sajtos roló and watched The Time Traveler's Wife, starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams. I'd heard before that the book was good and wanted to read it, but these days it's getting harder and harder to select what to watch and I was glad I could come up with a title, so we stack to it.

The story centers on the life of Henry (with a difficult surname), a librarian, who can travel through time due to some genetical disorder. Traveling, however, is independent of his will. He cannot decide which time to travel to, how long to stay, not even when to leave. As it is, he might disappear any time, and arrive at a different point in his life, naked. One of the funniest parts is when he disappears right before the wedding ceremony, and an older self appears instead, with greying temples and a stubble.
The film was labelled as a romantic sci-fi drama, which is a fine example of putting words after each other without making sense. Nevertheless, it shows how difficult it is to categorize it. It is definitely not for nerds who spend their youth watching Star Trek and the like because it has nothing to do with physical laws and theories. (Perhaps because the book was written by a woman.) The issue here is more of a philosophical kind. Time traveling has always been a prominent problem of human thinking, especially in relation to "What-if" questions, and here both the positive and negative side effects are dealt with.
Another important issue the story targets is no less than the nature of time and time traveling. That is, can the course of events be influenced by traveling in time or is it predestined? If you remember the TV series Quantum Leap (1989-1993), there the protagonist was "sent back" to put right certain events, e.g. people dying. Sliders (1995-2000) projected a different theory, according to which there are lots of parallel dimensions with correspondences between them, e.g. the characters often met themselves among strikingly different conditions. The Time Traveler's Life, however, seems to favor the concept that the course of events cannot be changed no matter how hard you try, and I think there is something inherently cruel in it.
I read in one of the comments that there would be no plot if the protagonist couldn't travel in time, but it's so utterly stupid I don't even want to discuss it. Of course it is the point of the whole story. But I don't think it is nothing more than the story of this couple. The issues raised here are related to relationships in general. In other words, the viewer, too, travels through the course of a life and a marriage, with the positive and the negative side both depicted, and it is definitely worth watching (and pondering on). I think I'll get a hold on the book as well.

P.S. Eric Bana is just so gorgeous!