As the audience we don't learn the specifics of how Gil time travels, and that's part of the fun. We don't learn how he time travels, and we don't learn how Gil travels with Adriana.
The time travel is a plot device but it is also, funnily enough, utterly inconsequential. The point is that each character who simply "slips through time" is not content with where and *when* they live, and believe there is a specific time in the past which their lives would be complete.
Gil learns this isn't true, and figures out how to find the best aspects of his own time. Adriana doesn't figure this out, and stays in her ideal past. Maybe Adriana has a perfect life, maybe not.
The point is, most of us romanticise the past and wish we lived in some bygone era - it is the time in which we live and the advantages we have (knowing how we have it so good and how it compares to the past) which allows us to even wish we lived in the past, even with the disadvantages.
We are, collectively, a very odd species.
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OKAY! So you want to talk about the Time Travel, OKAY! Fine. *sigh* ;)
One of the simplest and yet most intriguing ideas about inter-dimensional/time travel ideas I've ever read is the idea of simply "sliding" from one point to another - points in existence which are very close in time and space and yet not quite *there* can, because of cosmic interaction, briefly overlap.
Now it's not impossible, within the confines of the story, that Gil stumbles upon a semi-regular overlap while on vacation. It could be that the overlap is orbital (think about if there was a slightly lopsided Earth in the same Space but 100 years back in Time, as our own Earth). So every night at midnight there is a brief intersection of dimensions, the focal point (where it is *literally* in focus) is at that particular street and at around midnight - the arrival of the car is close to midnight but never exactly on midnight.
SO, for a short period, there are a number of inter dimensional Earths which Gil travels to - himself, and then with Adriana, and aside the lone detective hired to follow Gil - and it's simply a matter of the tangled (Strings) and uncertain (Quantum) nature of Space and Time which enables Gil to practically stumble about.
And it's only because Gil has no ill-will towards the future and simply seeks to be a better writer that he doesn't rewrite history from the 1920s onwards - aside from the bit that the French guide reads aloud to Gil.
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