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And puberty greets every day: Mark and Margaret relive a day over and over again
Photo:
Amazon Studios
Every day is the same for Mark.
Not because a global pandemic has paralyzed his everyday life.
And he just keeps moving from screen to screen in his youth room.
It's because Mark (Kyle Allen) is stuck in a time warp, a real one.
When he gets up in the morning, the same things always happen: his father ponders a Sudoku puzzle, his sister loses her soccer game, a woman taps the same wrong numbers on the lottery, in the evening there is a thunderstorm.
It has all been repeated so many times that the teenager moves through this day as if dancing with his eyes closed through the choreography of a small-town dreariness.
But as is often the case with monotony: It is broken when you no longer expect it.
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The appearance of Margaret changes Mark's preprogrammed day
Photo: Amazon Studios
Because suddenly Margaret (Kathryn Newton) steps into his preprogrammed day and brings everything off the beat, especially Mark.
Margaret, you find out pretty quickly, is in the same time warp.
The two become accomplices in this perpetual motion machine one summer day.
Sensitive and clever
However, destruction orgies, burger competitions and lottery winnings also get boring at some point.
So they decide to capture all the little, perfect moments of that day: a craftsman is playing the piano forgettingly, an old pair of lovers is dancing on the veranda, a schoolgirl is doing a stunt on her skateboard.
And because Ian Samuel's "The Map of Tiny Perfect Things" is a romantic comedy, the scavenger hunt for the beautiful but often forgotten treasures of everyday life ends with the two, of course, falling in love.
At least Mark.
It's a little more complicated with Margaret.
With the coming-of-age comedy "Sierra Burgess is a Loser" on Netflix, Ian Samuels has already proven that he succeeds in capturing teenage life sensitively and cleverly and finding stories away from the thousands of staged high school elegies.
Also in his new tragic comedy, which can now be seen on Amazon Prime Video, he is not filming - luckily - Bill Murray's time warp evergreen "Groundhog Day".
The point here is not that a cool, successful, if lousy dude, to whom half the world is open anyway, also stops time.
In Samuel's version, which is based on a short story by Lev Grossman, who also provided the script and the really nice dialogue, not even Mark is the main character in the story.
The fact that the audience and the teenager, whom Kyle Allen plays wonderfully tender and hard at the same time, notice this at the same time and rather late is a bold trick.
Who and what is “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” then about?
Without giving too much away: about grief and the fact that you often can't cope with it.
And about Margaret, of course, and her power to let time stand still when you want nothing more.
A time warp is not always a detention in everyday life.
When you grieve for something, it is a release.
Icon: The mirror
