Tomorrow Is Always Too Long slices through media-soaked life in Glasgow

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      Tomorrow Is Always Too Long
      Directed by Phil Collins. Rating unavailable. Showing at the Cinematheque on Wednesday, January 14, at 7:30 p.m.

      This 2014 feature has been widely billed as a “love letter to Glasgow”, but don’t expect a conventional cinematic essay. English director Phil Collins (no, not that one, a different one) is a visual artist by trade, and here he leaps from satire to reflection to manifesto, all the while allowing fragments of wildly different genres to collide.

      Tomorrow Is Always Too Long is steeped in present-day Glasgow, to be sure, but the film’s scope is far wider. It is an apparition about apparitions, specifically the digital ones we inhabit daily. The experience is like channel-surfing with a serious fever. One minute, you’re looking at a fake infomercial for a wearable product called Search Me that guarantees you’ll be groped by airport security. The next, a smash cut brings you to a woman dressed as a showgirl, speaking earnestly about vegetarianism and abbatoirs. Or to what seems to be a quiz show with a garish set and young contestants wearing heavy makeup, who struggle with questions like “What do the letters in AIDS stand for?” but who then ace rapid-fire tasks like “Name four service providers for a mobile phone.”

      This electronic twitchiness is soothed  by a chiming ambient soundtrack and a spookily subdued animation that recurs in slate grey and blue, following shadow-puppet-like figures out on a night of drugs and anonymous sex. But the film actually lifts off in an intermittent series of what can only be described as offhand music videos, in which seemingly average Glaswegians—a young couple in a prenatal class, a bartender at a karaoke night, even a prison inmate—suddenly break into breathtaking orchestral-pop tunes by Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon.

      And at the centre of it all, right at the midpoint of the film, is Mindy, a frustrated psychic who halts her vapid TV ad, fixes the camera with a stare, and unleashes a riveting five-minute diatribe against our online culture (“You retreat into the surface and hide yourself there….Does it make sense to ask yourself ‘What have I become? Or what the fuck am I now?’”)

      Love letters are often haunting, and Tomorrow Is Always Too Long is certainly that. But they're rarely so biting, strange, or funny.

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