‘Borges And Me’ Review: Marc Turtletaub’s Road Movie Is Literary And Playful

Sometimes it feels like the growing subset of films set in the stuffy British academic world of the early ’70s deserve a genre all to themselves. It’s a very interesting visual paradox; young people going out into the world to discover and further themselves in an environment that’s been stained nicotine-brown by the chain-smokers of their parents’ generation. Beer comes in heavy pint mugs, to be drunk in “snugs”, at pubs that most people get to and from in rickety death-trap cars almost a decade before seatbelts were made compulsory.

This world is the setting for a real-life road trip taken by American writer Jay Parini (played by Fionn Whitehead), who, in 1971, enrolled at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to fulfil his dream of becoming a poet. Parini is trying to put his old life behind him; on his conscience is the fact that he has inadvertently inspired his younger brother Billy to sign up for service in the Vietnam war. Billy sends him diary-like cassette tapes from the heart of the combat zone that become increasingly bleak, making Parini’s quest to find a mentor — “someone who would help me become a writer” — all the more desperate.

Parini goes through a series of mentors, the first being academic scholar Alistair Reid (Alan Cumming), who agrees to help Parini if he helps his pre-teen son Jasper with tuition in return. Alistair has the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges (Luis Gnecco) coming to stay, but Parini seems oddly unconcerned by the imminent arrival of this master of letters. Instead, Parini is planning, as part of his PhD project, to interview reclusive poet George Mackay Brown (Peter Mullan), who never leaves his hometown in Orkney. In a very plausible exchange, Parini’s tutor is appalled, telling him, “We prefer our poets dead in Scotland,” adding that the aim of the course is “to study writers, not become one.”

In a further blow, Parini’s plans go right off the rails when Alistair has some bad news from London and leaves him in charge of the elderly, ailing Borges, then 72. Saving Parini the bother of canceling the interview, Borges gamely offers to join him on a road trip to Orkney. “I’ve always wanted to see the Highlands,” he says, despite having become totally blind in 1955. “You will be my eyes.”

According to a title card at the end of the movie, almost everything that happens in the film is true, to a degree. That intel would be better placed at the start, since it takes a while to get into the rhythm of this sometimes hallucinatory journey. For a time, there’s a possibility that Borges might not even be real, since he speaks in epigrams such as “I believe in everything”. His childlike enthusiasm is endearing, though, as he imagines Parini as Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, pausing to visit the Carnegie Library where he horrifies the stuck-up staff by licking a leather-bound copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Some books should be tasted,” he explains, before peeing in the car park.

Curiously, Borges drops out of the story for a while after a trip to Loch Ness, where Parini develops a crush on a well-read hotel worker (Freya Mavor) who, being a fellow poetry aficionado, offers to join him for the Orkney leg of the trip. Up to now, the prospect of the two poets meeting has been an enticing one, but it never happens. By contrast, Brown is in some ways the polar opposite of Borges: Dry, and gnomic, he rejects the romanticization of art, speaking rapturously of beer and saying, of his work, that “a poem is the next best thing to silence”. (Tellingly, he also admits that “I live too much in my own head.”)

When Parini returns to rejoin Borges, the film has lost a little of its steam, perhaps since the road trip has already reached its destination. Nevertheless, in this final stretch, director Marc Turtletaub unexpectedly delivers the film’s most striking scene, in which Parini takes Borges to the site of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and the pair commune to summon up the brave, rebellious ghosts of the past. It’s the only point in the film in which Parini — a serious fellow, more like a young Michael Foot than the velour-jacketed hippies in his year — seems to bond with his riding partner, and it’s a rare moment in which the film actually bends towards Borges’ metafictional genius. Though it is undoubtedly smart, literary and playful, Borges and Me could do with a spot more of that.

Title: Borges And Me
Festival: Edinburgh (Out of Competition)
Director: Marc Turtletaub
Screenwriters: Oren Moverman, Jay Parini
Cast: Alan Cumming, Fionn Whitehead, Freya Mavor, John Gordon Sinclair, Luis Gnecco, Morven Christie, Peter Mullan, Stuart Bowman
Running time: 1 hr 49 mins