The boy had always been attracted to any tales connecting the concepts of time and love. Thus he’s come across the book titled Love and Time Travel and it captivated him. At 18, he was yet searching for different forms of love, ways in which it was more than just simple pair of loved-up teenagers. All his life he wondered about the most abstruse factor of all, time, and its possible influence upon people, relationships, choices and even the very course of their lives. As he sat down to watch the movie, he pondered how love and time travel would be relating in a way he never thought was possible before, as two analogical concepts colliding.
The focus of this film is on a boy called Henry, however this boy has a secret and it is time-location travelling only that he can visit places where he has ever loved someone. It is a story about Henry, but not about changing the past or rectifying the mistakes, but going back to the most precious and fragile moments of one’s life. The boy saw how Henry was equipped with a decision based on his feelings. And he understood the difference between this film and other time travel films filled with out of this world missions or events in history. This was a film about relationships, how time affects love and how love, in its turn, affects time.
The moment Henry used his power for the first time was to go back to the day he met his girlfriend, Sarah, for the first time. It was a day like any other, unremarkable, just an accidental bump in the way at a coffee house but for Henry, nothing was ever the same after that. Halfway through that particular transaction, the boy, Henry, felt like missing the little things in everyday life that may be insignificant at that particular moment, but later on would form a basis for something greater. He realized that Henry was not a passive observer of events in the images; he returned to the past and relished every detail of Sarah’s laughter, her glances and the warmth radiating from them that had preceded the eruption of the two. The boy, of course, soft gravitated from the boy mindset, to a more advanced phase of thinking, he couldn’t stop ruminating, all those unfulfilled emotions that so many wish they could live again if not to change anything but simply to experience it again.
Henry kept bouncing back and forth through time and recounting the entire rollercoaster of his relationship with Sarah. At this stage of the boy’s life, there was some sort of complication. Time was not a parameter that Henry could bend – only the past that was filled with love could he ever hope to return to. The boy thought that this was both a beautiful and tragic concept. It made him ponder how love is perhaps an oplock, how certain moments and feeling, remain within one when all is said and done. In the case of Henry, the concept of time wasn’t used to avoid the consequences of a modern society or to plagiarize upon history. It was about a longing to preserve the past that already existed. It made the boy consider his own relationships, the sense that whatever ones loves, it is at best ephemeral, and how the memories meld into a person.
The film had many moving moments but one of them is when Henry time traveled back to the period in his life when he had not yet met Sarah and was still a boy living with his family. The child recognized that love should not always be confined into couples, rather, it was part and parcel of Henry’s life. He went back to a glorious day with his grandmother, a talk with his father; a cozy moment with his young sister. Each of these journeys conveyed to the boy that love does not include just konflicts or love scandals or strange proclamations. Love sometimes in the unremarkable and mundane times which people overlook but with time, such moments become great in one’s mind.
As the plot unfolded, Henry started to notice his limitations. He found that while he could bring back images of the past, he could not alter events in the past, nor could he fast forward to the future. For the boy this was an allegory of love and time as people think. How people are constrained by how much memories one can take and how everything that is taken away from one will not always guarantee a satisfactory future. Henry started to understand that even if he was tempted to constantly relive the past, love was here and now. That was shocking for the boy. It got him pondering about the delicacies with which people are almost always willing to turn back and reach for the love that they are able to enjoy in the present after having children and reason about the loss of something more precious at the moment.
As the movie progressed, the bond that was between Henry and Sarah became quite formidable. With Henry’s incessant time travel, there began to be a separation between them in the dynamics of the present day. He was so absorbed in enjoying the highlight of their affection, which was all about the past that the relationship they were currently in was being ignored. To him, this had an even deeper meaning: it illustrated how love could be romanticized as a time dimension, a period that has long since gone. It was not that Henry didn’t care about Sarah – he did. He always wanted to go through every happy moment with her, over and over again. However, in doing so, he lost every opportunity of building new experiences with her.
The most pivotal moment of the movie was when Henry accepted the paradox of his timetravelling ability; it was an asset but also an achilles heel. He had the opportunity to return to the sweet moments of falling in love again but had no opportunity to alter the times when love turned sour. One particular scene I found rather disturbing was when Henry traveled back to an argument he had with Sarah and witnessed how it started. But there’s the boy on the ground, he can see it all happening and is full of a desire to make it right when he watched himself, say the wrong things, do the wrong things and no, he cannot make it right. However, the boy understood the import of that moment too – how in love, there are times when one commits a blunder in wishing that one had done otherwise. This made him ruminate over how fragile relationships are when he realized that even if he made it his mission to do everything possible, there was no way for him to go back and change what had been done. There’s only so much you can do. You can only listen to the past.
In a way, Henry was able to accept that love did not mean clinging on to the past, it was about living in the present and creating a future. He understood that while going into the past helped him feel all the love he had for Sarah more, it also prevented him from actually enjoying her company in the present. This message made the boy understand the connection between love and time in a more intense manner. You cannot go back in time and alter what has transpired, and there is no way to see into the future. The only thing that matters is that you be in the moment and appreciate the love that you possess at this point in time.
The boy remained still and began to reminisce over all that the film had taught him while the end credits appeared on the screen. The stories of Love and Time Travel were not only about a man who can change the course of time, but explaine how the forces of love are stronger than any point in time, how it freezes the flow of time in a person, how the fantasies of going back in the past lure even more than in the present and what you should steal in the very language of my time– the present moment. The boy came to see that love isn’t surrendering and freezing to memories; it is what you grasp in bright and headaches moments and flowers. And those moments, however little they come, are what give substance to living.
The boy seemed transformed since the comfort he derived from the film was consonant with a new level of understanding of the dynamic of love and time. The audience left Love and Time Travel with not only something more than a fresh perspective on time but also how it is imperative for one to love wholly in the moment without packing emotions of the past or the anxiety of what tomorrow holds.
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