We fetishize Europe for its old-feeling. The wine you’re drinking really was made by a proud old man who was taught to do so by his father on land that’s been used for this purpose far back into memory. There are ornate buildings and covered fish markets with negotiable prices. Warm baguettes and cute corners overhung by cafes, where you can feel like you’re stepping into a Van Gogh painting, and not really be wrong, are unavoidable. But Europe also has futuristic charms: the bullet trains, that you can take from one country to a completely different one; the minimalist furniture in airport lounges; the techno that’s so forward-looking they’ll be listening to it in bars on a colonized asteroid; soccer stadiums lit neon red. When I visit, I look warmly at opposite directions of history at the same time, reveling in differently temperatured attachments.
This is why The Bourne Identity is the most European feeling movie. The first well-lit shots are of fishermen, whose actual living is earned like men have been earning livings since forever, by going out on boats and pulling fish out of the sea. They have long, wet hair, gray whiskers, and heavy, well-worn rain gear. They are slouched around a table in the galley of a boat pitching in a dark storm, exclaiming as they slap cards down in anger or triumph next to an crowded ashtray. Soon after, the film takes you into a picturesque Italian port through the morning mist, docks, buoys, and moored fishing boats all rich and drab, all lined by a strip of narrow pastel houses, the sound of a large bell echoing out from town. Then you see a little three wheel fish-hauling motor vehicle drive along the wet industrial promenade, that Bourne disappears onto as it crosses his path. All of which foment vibes that haven’t changed much since, say, Italy and Germany were first unified, and that well-off people around the world like to pay a lot to be immersed in.
But these old, quaint scenes are intersected by signs of modernity’s tactical efficiency and cool. The location tags typed across the screen to digitish noises. The suit on Bourne’s limp body when he’s pulled out of the water: some kind of synthetic sponge material you might find in a kind of computer product I can’t place right now, affixed with a range of equipment of undeterminable utility, bespeaking specialized tactical savvy. CIA HQ in Langley: a buzz-cut, tie-wearing achiever pushing open a glass door to an office paved all around with pale wood, computer monitors accessing the world’s CCTV footage.
The fishermen are kind to Bourne. The captain pulls bullets out of his back, and gives him clothes, food, friendship, a wad of starter cash. On my first watch, this didn’t seem weird; why shouldn’t they be friends? But now that we’ve edged out of the postwar sun into the fog of whatever era we’re now in, it played differently. It’s not that I don’t think fishermen today would pull in a man from overboard and shelter him without hesitation; but I also impulsively wonder, would they be as kind in the same situation today as they are in the film? Relatedly: are they supporters of the Northern League? Would they vote to expel Sicily? How would they feel about accepting a boatload of refugees from Syria?
Bourne is an alien creature, with alien skin, from a trim, clean, fabricated alien world. That world makes a business, in the film’s era, through the CIA, and today, through massive data collection and computational capabilities, of looking down bemusedly into the fishermen’s old reality like it’s inside a snow globe. And when this movie came out, had this alien not come crashing down out of nowhere into their space, the fishermen might not have really known that this world existed, let alone that they’re being watched by it. But today, they probably know all, and resent. The easy coexistence between past and future that draws me to Europe, that keeps me going back to the Bourne films over and over, is resolving to friction.
I saw The Bourne Identity for the first time in October of 2004, sitting on the end of a bed in a drab hotel in Mongolia, where I was on a school trip, about four months after moving to Shanghai, its own symbiotic hive of brilliance and depth. I started to love the world for offering me both history and science fiction. I hope this doesn’t all turn to wistfulness in the years ahead.