★★★☆☆
Makoto Ueda ingeniously nests two films inside each other, then gets distracted from his core premise, to faltering results.
Makoto Ueda has spent recent years writing the smartest low-budget puzzle boxes in Japanese cinema, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River, both built on a simple discipline: a gimmick is only worth having if you follow it all the way down. His directorial debut understands that too, for about half an hour, and then decides it would rather be doing something else.
The premise is a beauty. Two struggling artists, playwright Madoka (Marika Ito) and musician Kazuma (Kai Inowaki), each go to the cinema, only to find the film they are watching is the other person’s life, so that each is the movie the other is watching. The best passages come early, as the pair begin trading intelligence across the divide, advising each other on money troubles and fraying friendships using details gleaned from cutaways and close-ups the other was never placed to see. It is a lovely idea, and for a while the paradoxes tighten exactly as they should.
Then, almost the moment the concept starts paying out, Ueda reaches for the kitchen sink: the nested films become science-fantasy and yakuza pictures, licensing a goofiness poured over the story rather than squeezed out of it. The low point is a multiversal middle manager who scurries about fretting that two films oughtn’t be nested, a joke about the premise rather than an extension of it.
So it is half a fine film and half a mess, the mess deliberate but no better designed for that. At a brisk 67 minutes the collapse never quite tires, though, and the amiable energy may win you over more than it did me. In a goofy enough mood, the concept and the emotional payoffs make it worth the time.
You Are The Film played at Tubi FrightFest in London.