Miguel Gomes elegantly bridges 100 years of film history with an experimental, time-bending colonial-era story of a British civil servant trying to outrun his persistent fiancée.

It is a film of many enchantments.

Gomes doesn’t undercut the romance... instead, he leans into its petulance, allowing the formal ambiguity of the nonnarrative sections to suggest the possibility of another interpretation entirely.

Gomes’s films set up a perplexing economy of pleasure. All artworks enlist their audiences to help create their meaning, but in Gomes’s case you may feel that you are laboring to produce the enjoyment of his movies, rather than the other way around.