★★★
Makoto Ueda ingeniously nests two films inside each other, then gets distracted from his core premise – to faltering results.
Makoto Ueda has spent the last few years writing the smartest low-budget puzzle boxes in Japanese cinema, and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River both understood something crucial about the form: a gimmick is only worth having if you are prepared to follow it all the way down. His directorial debut knows this too, for about half an hour. Then it decides it would rather be doing something else.
The premise is a beauty. Two struggling artists (Marika Ito as Madoka, a playwright, and Kai Inowaki as Kazuma, a musician) each separately go to see a film, then find that the other person’s life is the movie they are watching – that they are each watching a film about the other. The Escher logic writes itself: nested frames, mutual spectatorship, two narratives folded into each other so that neither can claim to be the outer one. They start off watching each other sitting in an otherwise empty cinema, each wondering why the film is so dull. This person isn’t doing anything, just watching a film! But pretty soon they work out what’s happening (“I’m not in a film! You’re in a film!”) and how they might use the weirdness to their mutual advantage.
Ueda gets the good stuff going early, and the best passages here are the ones where the characters start trading intelligence, advising each other on business troubles and fraying friendships using information gleaned from cutaways and close-ups the other was never positioned to see. That is a genuinely lovely idea, and for a stretch the film builds on it with real rigour, the paradoxes tightening exactly as they should.
And then, almost the moment the concept begins paying out, Ueda stops developing his main idea logically and starts throwing in the kitchen sink. The nested films turn out to be science fantasy and yakuza pictures respectively, which becomes licence for escalating goofiness that has nothing to do with the logic that got us here. Silliness is not the problem; Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was very funny. The problem is that this silliness feels dropped in rather than generated by logical extrapolation of the premise, poured over the narrative instead of squeezed out of it. The low point is a multiversal middle manager, a clownish functionary who scurries about insisting that two films really ought not to be nested inside one another and trying to rectify the situation, fretting in the register of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. He is a joke about the concept rather than an extension of it, and every minute he is onscreen is a minute the film is not thinking.
So: half a good film and half a mess, and the mess is clearly deliberate, which is not the same as it being a good design. Yet at 67 minutes the collapse never quite becomes tiresome, and the whole thing runs on such amiable energy that you may well take to the back half more warmly than I did. If you’re in a goofy mood the fun concept and emotional payoffs make this worth your time.
You Are The Film is playing at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal