Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea: exuberant science fiction time-travel comedy with a subversive message about lost opportunities and possibilities

Jindrich Polak, “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea / Zitra vstanu a oparim se cajem” (1977)

One of a number of comic science fiction films made in the old Czechoslovkia in the 1960s – 70s, this film by the maker of “Ikarie XB-1” (a famous but more serious sci-fi film of a space migration) revolves around time travel and a set of identical twins, and what happens when you mix the two together and throw away a time-synchronisation equivalent of a GPS system. Sight gags and sci-fi slapstick make for a light-hearted film about a topic and themes that in the West would either call for a more po-faced, serious drama treatment or just wouldn’t be done at all. Though the plot becomes more bizarre as the film progresses, the pace is not so fast that viewers, even Western viewers with no knowledge of Czech – I saw this film without English sub-titles – can follow the shenanigans of central character Jan (Petr Koska) as he goes back and forth in time to thwart a dastardly plot to give Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany a hydrogen bomb from the future.

Kostka plays identical twins Jan and Karel: Karel is a spaceship pilot who’s also a womaniser and a drunk, Jan is his more sober and straight-laced brother. Karel gets a call to take some tourists on a trip to the past but before he can go to the port, he chokes on breakfast and dies. Jan has enough time to get his brother off to the morgue and into his uniform to impersonate him. Once aboard the ship, three of the tourists – they’re actually ageing Nazi crooks in disguise – hijack the craft and take it back to Berlin in 1941. There they greet Adolf Hitler and present him with the case containing the bomb – but it turns out they picked up the wrong case and it’s full of clothes. The crooks and Jan are bundled off to jail and must figure out a way of escape.

After escaping, the men go back to the present and their paths diverge: they go back to the period just before Karel dies and Jan then sets about changing the path of time so as to prevent Karel’s death and sabotage the crooks’ plan. This involves making another trip back to Nazi Germany but no-one has any proper sense of time so the second trip also slightly overshoots and the time-travellers arrive just before they arrived the first time. Don’t worry, it does sound very confusing – you just need to watch the movie to be able to sort out which Jan is which and how successfully Jan1 manages Jan2 and Jan3 and is able (or not able) to preserve family continuity!

Though made over 30 years ago, the film doesn’t look at all aged: the light is clear and the lines are sharp, men’s suits at least don’t look dated and even interiors and furniture look contemporary. The pace is brisk but the plot is straightforward if increasingly convoluted towards the end. The music soundtrack is a major highlight: light, a little humorous and sprightly with space ambient effects and much use of synthesiser-generated melodies that sound at once a little alien yet familiar and reassuring.

If I’d seen the film with English sub-titles, I’d have been able to appreciate more of its humour and jokes; there are many witty sight gags including creative uses of dishwashing liquid in dissolving dishes (and more besides!), the car with the back hood that flips up of its own accord at inconvenient times and the green spray that neutralises and zombifies people, all of which are important in advancing the plot and resolving it. The back-and-forth time-travel and its non-synchronisation (everyone comes and goes at times that are just ahead of when you think they should arrive or depart) are a running joke that might have a deeper meaning: what if certain important historical events could have been cut off or avoided had someone done something earlier rather than later? There is a subversive message in all the time-travelling that goes on: Jan foils an evil plot thanks to his being in the right spot five minutes (or 50 minutes at least) before the right time and ingeniously manages to cover up Karel’s untimely death as well. Now, if only he had gone back in time to try to stop the Soviets from marching into Prague in the 1940s or 1968 or whenever …

As science fiction movies go, the plot and characters, and especially Kostka’s clever timing as Jan who must be in several places at once, are prominent. There are no special effects at all: all the science fiction is in the plot and in one of the film’s running gags (the dishwashing liquid gag). “Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up …” is the kind of comedy I’d like to see more of and which has been sorely lacking in Western cinema (and still is) – fun, witty, exuberant and inventive with the possibilities offered by a science fiction standard – and with a bonus of a cutting comment on society about lost opportunities and the possibility of change.

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