Sliding Doors - Movie Review

Sliding Doors
“Never Go Back”

It’s expected for us human beings that when we find ourselves in any type of undesirable circumstance to immediately think back to situations where we could have altered our behaviour or decision in order to receive a better outcome. This of course is a necessary measure that needs to be taken because if we don’t learn from our past mistakes how we can effectively avoid repeating the same ones in the future. But one thing we need to accept is that sometimes no matter how well or affectively we strategize our lives, there are always external forces that hand us little and sometimes not so little surprises. In the movie “Sliding Doors” we see Helen, living with her boyfriend Gerry, who she financially supports because he’s a writer, struggling to author his first novel. Every morning Helen leaves her London apartment building and heads off to work at the Public Relations firm where she is 1/8 of a group of executives. Garry is supposed to be working on his novel, but is really having an affair with his American ex-Girlfriend Lydia. Lydia is a paradigm of how American women are seen from the British perspective. She’s devious, unsympathetic, and quite bitchy. The movie gets interesting when Helen is fired from her Job, and tries to catch the underground home. The film them diverge into two different but parallel scenarios. One where she gets on the tube, and walks in on her cheating boyfriend, we will call it scenario A, and the other scenario, which we’ll call scenario B she misses the tube and must find an alternate way home, and by the time she gets there her boyfriends ex had already exited the building. In scenario A Helen finds another boyfriend named James who turns out be a really great person, he’s self sufficient, and seems to have high value for fidelity. Her boyfriend encourages her to start her own Public Relations and Catering service, which blooms experiences rapid growth in little time. While in Scenario B She’s stuck with her cheating boyfriend (which by now she’s a little suspicious of) and is forced to take part-time jobs in order to pay the rent. You can’t help but feel sorry for the Helen stuck in scenario B. She got a real bad deal when parallel universes were being handed out. But life always has its little surprises. After making up over a mere misunderstanding with her new boyfriend James, our Scenario (A) Helen attempts to cross the street to phone her best friend at a nearby booth. Just as James calls out to her to say “I love you” She is hit by a van, and rushed to the Emergency room. At the same time Scenario B Helen, in a state of panic after the fears she had of a cheating boyfriend were confirmed, tripped down a flight of stairs, fleeing from her cheating boyfriend as he desperately tried to console her. She also was rushed to the emergency room. When in the hospital it is reviled to both James and Garry that Helen due to the accidents, lost the babies that neither James nor Garry knew their Helen was carrying. Sadly Helen in scenario A flat lines just as Scenario B Helen regains consciousness with Gerry at her bedside. To make a long story short, Helen ditches Gerry for good, and walks out of the hospital room a brand new woman. It just so happens that James was also in the hospital checking on her mother’s health status and was heading for the same elevator as Helen and even though these two had never met before (at least not in the current life) it was obvious by the way that they gazed at each other that they had some type of connection beyond the natural realm. The screen goes black and you have the rest of the credits to think about all the happiness that’s in store for Helen and James.

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