The Phenomena must be the only cinema in Barcelona where the tickets are not numbered. Thirty minutes before the movie, the line was halfway around the block. Almost all of us were over forty years old and had our own history with the protagonist. My companion was called Indy at school, and as a child I wanted to be an archaeologist. When I was older too: it was my second option when applying for a degree that could never be studied in Mallorca. I entered Journalism, which, somehow and at another rate, responds to the same adventurous vocation to unearth what time tries to hide.
Against all odds, we found a good place. A motivated audience applauded the Mission Impossible trailer. And suddenly you returned to the Chaplins in Palma, twelve years old and your best friend, who was also in love with Indiana Jones. And you were scared again at your aunt’s house, when they almost ripped out her heart in the cursed temple. And I don’t remember where I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I know all three movies by heart.
The Dial of Fate is an inside joke, an intimate wink, that look charged with complicity between best friends, aunts and nieces, obvious secret lovers, a lifelong marriage, generation mates. People who share the anguish for no longer being who we were and because it is difficult to face the passage of time. To the point that we would stay in the past so that it never happens.
Farewell to Indiana Jones is the farewell to a world that is ending in us, in theaters without numbered tickets, with long lines at the door, a two-dimensional screen and applause; in the adventures of the 20th century, without internet. At the end of the film, we cry knowing that we are analog, we are archeology, we only have nostalgia. “I’m back,” says Indiana Jones. And for a moment we forget that he did it to say goodbye.
