The Man from the Future

A science fiction comedy set in Brazil. Zero is a physicist. He was humiliated at a university ball twenty years ago and his life has stood still since. He works in a laboratory. He is building an apparatus for generating energy and the experiment explodes. When he wakes it is 1991. He has landed on the night of his own youth. He sees himself. The young Zero is going to the ball and will lose Helena there. He intervenes. He corrects the past, steers his younger self, and the ball ends differently. Then he goes back. From there the film becomes a story about consequences. The present has changed; Zero is rich, famous, and married to Helena. But something is not right. Helena is unhappy and the young Zero has found the time machine as well. The two Zeros meet. The young one has seen the price of what he did and stands against the older. What the narrative is interested in is not time but regret: its question is not whether the past can be corrected but whether what gets corrected is really what was wanted. The rules are kept tight. The narrative sets out the logic of its time travel at the start and does not break it. The tone is comic. The jokes come from Brazil in the 1990s, from the clothes and the music. Wagner Moura plays both characters and the difference between the two states is given through bearing rather than make-up. The film was a large box office success in Brazil and among the country's most watched local productions that year. Wagner Moura, Alinne Moraes, Maria Luísa Mendonça and Gabriel Braga Nunes are in the cast. Cláudio Torres directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone curious about light time travel comedy and Latin American cinema. Who it is not for: anyone looking for originality; the structure is familiar and the romantic line is predictable.