António and Jota return from the front with their friends, looking for an ancient Roman thermal bath. They joke with each other recounting past tactical glories. The baths have appeared after a long time spent under the water of a reservoir, and people of all ages curious about the discovery come to spend the day. But there is something mysterious about these thermal waters — as if the baths influence the mood of the men, giving them the courage to say things they have never told anyone.
José Tolentino de Mendonça, in his book The Mystic of the Instant, challenges us to not only think of time horizontally, meaning as a narrative succession of instances, but also vertically. Vertical time is not chronological and repeats itself unto eternity, it is the universe’s daily breath: the passing from day to night, the movement of the stars, the falling of rain. And cinema, which literally records time, is the art most uniquely capable of bringing us closer to this breath. In the extraordinary debut of Gabriel Azorín, the focus is precisely on the articulation of this verticality: we see two stories set in the same location, a Roman thermal bath, but separated by 2000 years. In both stories, fragile men confess their tender yearnings to their close friends. They are under the same sky and stars, bathing in the same baths, separated by time, but mysteriously folded into each other. In the leadup to the premiere of his film, Azorín wrote that “every film presents a conflict between the linearity and circularity of time. Cinema has a unique way of presenting itself as both a fleeting and permanent experience, reminding us that life is ephemeral while sheltering us in a habitable and eternal temporality.” Confronting us with the vertical or circular nature of time is to remind us of its passing, and in the words of a recently departed giant, “I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another… All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine — time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.”
Nabil Aouad
