Record/Play

It's interesting how uncommon time travel is in science fiction . Occasionally you get a film like BACK TO THE FUTURE using it in its central plot but ends becoming a mixed genre film where the time travel aspect is nothing more than a plot device in order to set up a romantic plot . The natural successor to HG Wells THE TIME MACHINE is obviously DOCTOR WHO but even that show usually ignores the time travel aspect and is only used as a tool in order to set up a different story every week . Off the top of my head only Day Of The Daleks from the classic show and Fathers Day from NuWho utilised the full potential of the concept of time travel

RECORD/PLAY is a further contribution to the theme of time travel but there's a lot wrong with it . The story involves a man travelling back through time in order to meet a woman in what looks like a classroom but he constantly finds himself back at the beginning of the story and the more he travels back to the past he finds a bigger obstacle waiting for him when he gets there . There's also a larger problem when he returns and that is the object he uses to get there looks as if its shelf life has come to an end . At least I think it does because there's not a lot of background to this story , the motives of the characters and perhaps most importantly where it's happening . The man is black , the female is Indian and a couple of other characters are obviously Slavonic . Let's hazard a guess and say it's the Balkans circa 1991 1992 . Why would an Indian female be in a classroom in 1992 ? Of course she might be an aid worker or something like that but this never explained . Perhaps somewhere along the line she could have had a line of dialogue added like " After all my years as an aid worker this has been my most satisfying assignment " Easy to do but it's slipped the production teams mind . There is also an unbelievable aspect and that's it's possible to fix a cassette tape . People of a certain age will remember this entertainment consumer product and will agree when I say once they're broken they stay broken and it's much easier to build a fully working time machine than what it is to mend a broken cassette tape

Going back in time is dangerous – we know this from multiple indie films where those trying to slip back and tinker have found themselves caught up in loops or finding more than they bargained for. So it is with Record/Play; we open with a man sitting listening to one of seemingly endless cassette tapes, picking one and hearing a woman's voice talking to him before suddenly stopping. The man wipes his tears and goes back into the workshop to find some tools. Next time he plays the cassette he is transported to the place where the woman is making the recording.

Record/Play doesn't really do anything we haven't seen before, it just does it quicker. The device of coming back multiple times in an attempt to fix a problem with a specific moment in time, but struggling to do so, is not an infrequent one but here it is not asked too much of because of the length of the film. We don't get any detail as to the background of the tapes (although the amount of them draws in the interest) nor to the specifics of the woman, but it is clear this is a personal tale to the main character. From the initial jump the film moves quite quickly, showing us the rules of this game, as it were before getting into the "additional information" series of jumps on the way to solid ending. There are holes in its internal logic if you pick at it a little, but generally it looks good and works. Performances from Shakir and Gupta are both good and Atlas' direction of them and the camera is good.

It is a well-trodden path in some ways, but the pace of this short plus the little details help to hold the viewer and, although it leads to a familiar place, it does still work well.