Borges and Me review – a sweetly imagined literary odyssey through the Highlands

There is great sweetness and high-minded, unworldly charm in this adaptation of American author Jay Parini’s embellished memoir, a romantic account of his road trip through the Scottish Highlands that, as a young doctoral student at St Andrews in 1971, he really did take with Jorge Luis Borges, the great writer whose blindness had become part of his mystique. Author of poetry, enigmatic short stories and metaphysical vignettes untranslatably known as the “ficciones”, Borges is described here as “the father of magical realism” – although he is surely more unique and interesting than that.

Parini and Borges are like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, whose presence is duly hallucinated at one stage, though it is odd that Borges, that profound Scotophile, does not specifically invoke Boswell and Johnson in the Outer Hebrides. It may be that screenwriter Oren Moverman, or Parini himself, is influenced by Gore Vidal’s memories of guiding around his blind grandfather, US senator Thomas Pryor Gore, whom he described as a “passionate sightseer”. Borges himself, in this film, on being introduced to the hesitant Parini, whimsically says: “Speak up – I am blind!” Borges is a huge Bob Dylan fan – and, apropos Vietnam, anti-war – although the script does not specifically anticipate Borges’ description of the Falklands war: two bald men fighting over a comb.

The source material is avowedly fictionalised and unreliable, and this is never more obvious here than in the fanciful scene in which Borges demands to be rowed by Parini out into the middle of Loch Ness so he can commune with the monster’s presence – and actually falls in the water, supposedly gets rescued by Parini and the film cuts sharply to Borges cordially drying off later in the local pub. Try clambering into a rowboat from the water and you’ll know how plausible this is. But maybe Parini and Borges swam to shore. And yet in many ways, the story does have the ring of truth – particularly in the section in which Parini has to talk to a second and entirely different twinkle-eyed literary legend, the poet George Mackay Brown, on whom Parini is supposed to be writing his PhD, played with opaque geniality by Peter Mullan. If this story was simply fictional, introducing a second figure of this sort would be struck out by any script editor as being an unnecessary duplication. But this is the messy wrongness of real life.

The title alludes to Borges’ story Borges and I, which reflects on the difference between the writer’s public persona and his private identity. For almost the entire film, the indefatigable Borges seems to be putting on an act and yet, while quizzing Parini on his amorous adventures with a local woman (Freya Mavor), he reveals something of his own loneliness and regret. The effect is genuinely affecting and sad, and it is a lovely performance from Gnecco.