Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Part of that glut of late seventies Czech time travel comedies, and yes, I’m sure you’re as tired of hearing about them as I am writing about them.
I’ll keep this brief as I can’t imagine anyone listening to this isn’t intimately familiar with it, but on the off-chance you’ve been living under a rock for the past forty years, we’re introduced to twins Jan and Karel, one a mild mannered engineer who invented the process of time travel and used it to set up a chrono-tourist business, the other a brash, womanising drunk and also pilot/astronaut of the spacecraft used to bend time to our will.
His reckless lifestyle leads Karel into financial difficulty, making him an easy target for a group of Nazis who have hatched a plan to take an advanced weapon back to Hitler mid WW2 to change the course of history. There’re safeguards against such things, of course, but the pilot can over-ride them. Finding this less risky than a payday loan service, Karel agrees to sell his soul to the Nazis. Not long after, he chokes to death on a roll.
While Jan’s upset by his brother’s death, he also sees an opportunity to make a change to a life that he’s finding mundane and unfulfilling. He assumes Karel’s identity, and all of the hassle that comes along with it – with angry husbands being the least of it – and before long he’s an unwitting Nazi accomplice, trying to foil their plans while keeping himself alive.
Being a comedy, there’s a fair amount of bumbling ineptitude from everyone involved, leading to a nicely convoluted final act where there’s something of a do-over with multiple, day-apart versions of people flailing around, the details of which I’ll leave to the interested.
It would be cynical to say that we chose to cover Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea purely on the strength of the title. Cynical, but entirely accurate, it being up there with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as needlessly specific titles go. Apparently something of a cult classic in the UK following a terrestrial TV screening some decades back, I’d never heard of this, presumably for the reason that, hipsterism aside, it’s not all that remarkable a film.
I mean, it’s fine: the high level concept’s good, and there are enough chuckles raised throughout that I don’t think I’ve wasted my time watching it. But is it worth, hypothetically speaking, registering on Czech language piracy message boards to hunt down a copy? Probably not. It has quite the soundtrack, though.
In the admittedly astronomically unlikely event you stumble upon an easily accessible copy of this and you’re in the mood for some light, knockabout comedy, and I suppose also the disturbing increase in Actual Nazis knocking about these days hasn’t put them into the “no laughing matter” category for you, it’s an enjoyable enough watch.