Do you often feel like your days are painfully similar to each other: the once-favorite song that you recklessly set as an alarm, meaningless meetings with colleagues, evenings on the couch with a laptop? You seem to be tired of getting stuck in this swamp, but you feel that you can’t do without a “magic jerk”? Well, watching a Palm Springs comedy about what it’s like to really be stuck in the same day might well be such a jerk.
It would seem that Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin fully revealed this topic in the film Groundhog Day almost thirty years ago, and the TV series Matryoshka told about what could remain unsaid last year. But it seems that life, which has ceased to change, surprise, and most importantly, arrange, is an eternal story. Or at least very relevant for the last few generations. And the question is more about how witty and elegant the next variation is and whether the characters are nice to us or not.
The heroine of “Palm Springs” Sarah is pretty. In any case, those who recognize themselves in her, a gloomy ironic girl over 30, a white crow in her own family. November 9 is not the easiest day for Sarah: her sister is getting married, but a funny stranger saves her from the boredom of a mortal (and at the same time from the need to make a toast). The evening takes an interesting turn, and everything goes towards spontaneous intimacy, when suddenly…
Let’s do without spoilers, let’s just say that Sarah wakes up the next morning, and on the calendar again on November 9, and the next day too. And it’s not so important why this happened: the creators of Palm Springs do not set themselves high moral goals, and Sarah, and at the same time another hero who is stuck with her in Groundhog Day, still does not find an answer to this question. , for what such sins she fell into a time loop.
Which, by the way, can frustrate the viewer a little, but also make you think that it is in our power to change life at least a little and right today, now. And also about the fact that the most ordinary, unremarkable day of our life, whatever one may say, is better than a weekend in sultry California, which is repeated over and over again.
Previous variations in a nutshell
- Groundhog Day is a 1993 classic comedy film starring Bill Murray. Phil Connors, a meteorologist and not the most pleasant type, during the celebration of Groundhog Day in the town of Punxsutawney gets into a time loop. The moral transformation of the hero helps to get out of it: a rethinking of the attitude to people and to life in general. By the way, Groundhog Day is a very real holiday: every year on February 2 in the USA and Canada, it is customary to observe a groundhog. It is believed that if the animal does not see its shadow and calmly crawls out of the hole, winter will soon end. They say that they did this in ancient Rome, though instead of a marmot they watched a hedgehog.
- “Matryoshka” (Russian Doll) — An 8-episode Netflix mini-series about a girl who dies over and over again on the day of her 36th birthday, and the next morning she tries to figure out why this happened and how to stop it. Fans of gloomy humor may like the spectacle: there are childhood psychotraumas, and the “anniversary syndrome”, and the search for oneself.
If you are interested in more serious variations on the theme of the time loop, you should watch the series “Darkness”. This is an independent phenomenon and a completely different story.
“Darkness”: lessons from the past