Borges and Me should really have been called “Me and Borges,” for it is less about the iconic Argentine writer and more about the non-titular character, PhD candidate Jay Parini, from whose memoir the screenplay was adapted. While that is not a weakness in itself, what is disappointing is that we never quite experience the fantastical world of magical realism associated with Borges’s imaginative short stories (especially as he is introduced as “the father of magical realism” with aplomb). Instead, we get a bucket list of his eccentricities, aphorisms and literary wit, all of which is colourful enough, certainly, but considerably less wondrous than the universe his writing opened up for his readers.
What the film ultimately resembles is a road movie with a father figure, using the familiar genre as an ersatz for the intellectually paternal relationship between a budding young writer and an experienced older one. After an excellent introduction by Parini’s self-assured voice-over (“after meeting Borges, the way I saw the world would never be the same”), the film unfortunately begins to degenerate into a succession of platitudes about life, writing and friendship that rarely show us the promised transformation. In contrast to Fionn Whitehead’s attractively reserved rendition of Parini, the Chilean actor Luis Gnecco feeds lines such as “libraries are women to be loved” with maybe too much self-assured extravaganza, thus revealing more about the machismo of 1970s Latin American culture than about some profound Borgesian wisdom. Even the film’s intellectual flourishes — “a poem is the next best thing to silence”, this time uttered by the poet George Mackay Brown — eventually begin to sound like aphorisms picked for the occasion rather than discoveries emerging naturally from the characters.
As much as Marc Turtletaub’s direction relies on this, Borges’ quirky eccentricities are not enough to hold up a plot constructed on his witticisms. His eccentricities can be amusing, as, for instance, when he and Parini share the same bed, or when the blind writer casually relieves himself on the wheel of their parked car, but they eventually become mannerisms rather than windows into his imagination. This is particularly frustrating because the real Borges is surely more interesting than this, and the duo must have formed something of a strange couple in which the writer’s anti-establishment attitude certainly infused real life with possibilities that the film leaves dangling.
Similarly, Alan Cumming as Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet, Borges translator, and writer who becomes an important link between the generations feels frustratingly under-exploited. While the film briefly gestures towards a more complicated intimacy between Parini and Cumming, it never really explores it, and a latent homoeroticism which briefly screams for attention is again suddenly abandoned. Instead, the adaptation seems determined to keep everything safely within the boundaries of a family-friendly literary adventure, if families were only interested in movies about writers.
And adaptation is perhaps the word that best describes the problem. The traces of Jay Parini’s memoir are sometimes too visible: scenes feel like remembered episodes arranged one after another rather than parts of a steadily developing dramatic structure. The protagonist’s brother, who sends him tapes from Vietnam, briefly introduces a much-needed historical counterpoint to the odd-couple journeying through Scotland, but his tragic death never really carries the weight the director hoped it would in the film’s finale. Similarly, the much-anticipated meeting between Parini and his new love interest is placed on such a pedestal (had Borges only not warned him!) that the (non)romance becomes almost as (non)syrupy as the scene in which she starts singing at Loch Ness.
The film does offer some touching moments. Borges’s confession that he has still never experienced consummated love at seventy feels startlingly real and starts to explain some of the writer’s universe. The Don Quixote metaphor, through which Borges suggests he and Parini imagine themselves as literary companions on a strange adventure, however, points towards the kind of imaginative play the script should have pursued more boldly. Unfortunately, the moments that most obviously invite a magical-realist treatment — particularly those at Loch Ness and on the battlefield — are among the least convincing. For a film centered on the father of magical realism, these sequences never quite achieve the creativity they promise.
Even the cinematography seems reluctant to take that leap: its muted, maroon-tinged palette works beautifully with the perpetual Scottish fog, but otherwise remains rather flat, turning St Andrews, the Carnegie Library and the Highlands into something resembling a vintage photography tour. At one point, Alastair suggests that St Andrews itself is like a film set, with professors playing their parts to attract tourists; Borges and Me occasionally feels exactly like that: a virtual tour of Scotland with a famous writer in the passenger seat.
There is something strangely appropriate about this, though. Borges tells Parini that nobody can really teach anybody anything. After almost two hours of his optimism, eccentricity and literary wisdom, one begins to suspect that he may have been right. The film promises that the leading man’s meeting with Borges will change the way he (and, maybe we, too) see the world. What it ultimately gives us is a pleasant, occasionally touching and handsomely photographed road trip — but very little of the world-changing strangeness that made Borges worth meeting in the first place.
Borges and Me is screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival running from 13-19 August.
