Tiny Budgets, Big Ideas: Two Micro-Features Dive Into The Anxious Vortex Of The Times
By Liam Lacey
Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes: Lo-Fi Time Travel in a Japanese Café
Rating: A
In normal times, January is one of those dumping periods when small-budgeted films that can’t compete with the end-of-year Oscar and holiday movies are released. Now, with widespread theatre shutdowns, their chances of reaching audiences are even more limited.
A pair of films released this week from debut feature directors —Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and Delicate State — are well-worthy of attention for their ingenuity and peculiar timeliness. I recommend you catch them if and when you can.
Anxiety about being stuck in time is the idea behind the Japanese sci-fi comedy, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, a film shot with an iPhone, a couple of video monitors, a small theatre company, and an ingenious director (Junta Yamaguchi) working from a mind-bending screenplay by Makoto Ueda. The winner of awards at a half-dozen genre film festivals in the last year, it’s a cheerfully intricate amusement that, by chance, speaks to the current pandemic time warp and too much screen time.
At the end of the evening, a tired young café owner and aspiring musician, Kato (Kazunari Tosa) says goodnight to his last employee and retires to his small apartment above his business. He sits on his single bed and picks up his guitar but can’t find his pick.
Unexpectedly, a voice from the closed-circuit video monitor, which is on a two-minute delay from the café downstairs, tells him to look under the rug. Who the hell is still in the locked restaurant? It turns out the person on the monitor is Kato himself, apparently addressing him from two minutes in the future, in one of those irksome rips in the time-space continuum. Kato goes down to the café below his apartment and has the same conversation with himself on the video that shows two minutes ago.
A friend, Komiya (Gota Ishida) comes by and calls some other friends over to witness this peculiar glitch. One friend, Ozawa (Yoshifumi Sakai) has a bright idea: Get the two video monitors facing each other, creating reflections in two, four, six, eight and an infinite number of minutes into the future. “I got a message from the future’s future’s future’s future,” a character crows.
Confused? Of course, though periodically, for the benefit of viewers and other characters, someone in the film offers a recap of what has happened. The friends try to figure out how to profit from their new skill, leading them to cross the wrong sort of people. Kato (having peeked into the future) gets the nerve to ask out the young woman (Aki Asakura) on a date, after his future self tells him she’ll agree.
Adding to the vertiginous fun, this brisk 70-minute film is edited in a way that makes it appear the entire film was shot in one long take back to the present, that moving spot between the growing past and the shrinking future.
Speaking of present anxieties, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was scheduled to be released Friday (January 6) in theatres in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, though provincial lockdowns have scuttled those plans. Currently it is available in Vancouver (Vancity) and Calgary (Globe Theatre, January 8 only).
Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes. Directed by Junta Yamaguchi. Written by Makoto Ueda. Starring Kazunair Tosa, Riko Fujitani and Gota Ishida.
Delicate State: A Pregnancy Video Diary of The New Civil War
Rating: B
Released to coincide with the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, Delicate State could have worked as an earnest documentary diary film about a young woman chronicling her first pregnancy while reflecting on the scary state of America. Instead, it’s a fictional film, though the pregnancy is real.
Director/writer Paula Rhodes and her real-life husband Charlie Bodin shot much of the film during 2015, using the frame of expectant parents’ video diary of their pregnancy against the onset of a new American civil war.
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The drama juxtaposes scenes of Rhodes and Bodin making video dairy entries chronicling their pregnancy for their son, Lincoln. The vlogs are initially mundane and cheerful: Doctor’s visits, morning sickness, clothes that don’t fit. And then something more sinister: Road closures, sounds of shouting voices, sirens and jets, the odd television report of political assassinations and chaos.
Though performances and execution are sometimes roughly amateurish, there’s a grim credibility to the scenario and a poignant parallel between Rhodes’ swelling belly and the rising anger in the streets. Along the real-time pregnancy diary videos, the filmmakers added footage from political protests, including the 2016 Women’s March, into their narrative about the gestation of a new American civil war.
The last third of Delicate State takes the couple out of the small theatre/home video confines of the couples’ house on to a road trip through the budget-limited battle zone, a scenario that is disturbing only in its plausibility.
In a recent New Yorker round-up of books about the current American political polarization, writer Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Canadian writer Stephen Marche’s new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future: “…running battles between protestors and militias, armed rebels attempting to kidnap sitting governors, uncertainty about the peaceful transition of power — reading about them in another country, you would think a civil war had already begun.”
Delicate State. Written and directed by Paula Rhodes. Starring Paula Rhodes, Charlie Bodin, Glenn Morshower, and Cathy Baron. Available now for rent or purchase through iTunes and other streaming services.