Director Elena Ferrante transforms Jay Parini's 2020 memoir into a whimsical road movie that prioritizes charm over literary depth. "Borges and Me" charts a college-aged Parini's Scottish Highlands journey with the legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a premise that practically begs for philosophical gravitas but instead settles for amiable wandering.
The film stars Louis Garrel as the younger Parini and Alberto Lastro as the aging Borges, casting choices that lean toward aesthetic appeal rather than thematic resonance. What emerges is a gentle, nostalgic buddy picture that captures the surface pleasures of a celebrated writer's company without excavating the deeper intellectual currents that defined Borges's work or his legacy in literary culture.
Parini's memoir offered genuine memoir material. A real 1970s encounter between the American writer and Borges provided fertile ground for exploring mentorship, literary ambition, and the gap between public genius and private personality. The anecdotal nature of the source material could have yielded either a character study or a meditation on influence and admiration. Ferrante opts instead for something breezier.
The Scottish setting works as backdrop rather than character. The Highlands' moody landscapes frame the duo's conversations, but the environment never threatens to overshadow their dialogue or challenge the film's fundamentally lighthearted tone. This is travel writing rendered as cinema, where destination matters less than the personalities sharing it.
What "Borges and Me" manages well is accessibility. Audiences unfamiliar with Borges's labyrinthine short stories or his towering influence on postmodern literature can still engage with this portrait of an aging literary lion encountering youthful American ambition. The film humanizes Borges without demanding viewers carry encyclopedic knowledge of "Ficciones" or "The Garden of Forking Paths" into the theater.
Yet that accessibility comes at a cost. The film's perky rhythms actively resist the darker, more uncertain territories that Borges himself inhabited. His fiction obsessed over paradox, infinite regress, and the slippery nature of reality and identity. "Borges and Me" skips these abstractions in favor of warm biographical moments and road-trip comedy beats. It's a film about a great writer rather than a film interested in what made that writer's imagination singular.
The supporting cast populates their journey with colorful locals and chance encounters, a structure that reinforces the travelogue quality. Each stop offers a small human story, each conversation a gentle lesson about literature or life. This accumulative approach works for memoir, where readers willingly piece together meaning from discrete anecdotes. In cinema, where visual storytelling must compensate for narrative thinness, the formula creates longueurs.
Garrel brings appropriate youthful reverence to his role, playing the aspiring writer as perpetually amazed to be in the presence of his hero. Lastro's Borges remains largely inscrutable, which may or may not be intentional on Ferrante's part. The choice keeps the legendary writer slightly unknowable, preserving a certain mystique but also preventing genuine dramatic tension.
"Borges and Me" finds its audience among viewers seeking literary cinema without literary challenge, a film that celebrates writers and reading without requiring viewers to grapple with what writers actually do. It's a nice postcard from the Scottish Highlands, not a descent into Borges's labyrinth.