River, #Manhole and Femme are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.
River
Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was a delightfully quirky experiment with time travel tropes. The film was rough and tumble from a visual standpoint, but its charm withstood its premise of a series of time loops filmed to appear as a single take. A fun and inventive film, it made Yamaguchi a director I was curious to follow moving forward.
What I did not expect was that he would follow up Infinite Two Minutes with a film that has a remarkably similar premise. The workers and customers at a small inn along the Kibune river suddenly experience a strange temporal occurrence. Every two minutes, the characters find themselves standing in the same spot they were in two minutes prior. A very short time loop has infected the area, sticking the tiny town in time. Desperately, they try to find some solution that can unstick them, running around to relay as much information to one another before they are thrust back to their starting locations.
River is not only as clever (if not more so) than Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. It also excels visually where Yamaguchi’s previous film faltered. The film benefits, for one, from location shooting in a gorgeous Kyoto area. But the interiors are also well designed, and the camera work during each cramped, frantic two-minute sequence is clean and energetic. River, I hope, will prove to be even more of a hidden gem than Infinite Two Minutes was, as it shows a major step up in Yamaguchi’s filmmaking abilities and is bursting at the seams with creativity and charm.
River: B+
#Manhole
On the eve of his wedding, Shunsuke (Yuto Nakajima) is surprised by his coworkers and friends with a bachelor party. After a good time and a few drinks, Shunsuke stumbles toward home, only to find himself plummeting underground through an exposed manhole. He wakes up with a leg too injured to climb the broken ladder to the surface, inciting a desperate struggle to escape.
The film takes great pains to get to the hashtag in its title, making half-hearted excuses for why social media becomes the dominant site for Shunsuke’s survival, as opposed to anyone in his contact book, or the police, or people wandering the streets. Creating a fake social media account, Shunsuke calls out to the internet for help in identifying his location. Soon, this online conversation becomes one of ill intent. Maybe, online users surmise, someone abducted Shunsuke and put him in the manhole. The film pivots into a mystery, where the goal becomes not only one of getting out of the hole but also one of identifying who would have motive to harm Shunsuke.
The whole plot is burdened by convenience and misplaced energy. Even were one to ignore the strangeness of strangers on the internet knowing intimate details about random employees at an anonymous real estate company — the internet can be quite good at this sort of invasive doxxing — the entire mystery unraveling on a phone screen is itself a flat conceit. A visual overlay gives us information, some likely true and some certainly not, about characters we have only seen in brief moments during the first scene. The film struggles to build intrigue in this way, where suspects are created out of those who began as background actors.
Meanwhile, the survival aspect of the film runs through the usual paces. Early attempts to get out of the hole are unsuccessful. Later attempts feel promising, but there is always a bait and switch. Shunsuke has an injury from the fall he has to deal with on his own. All of it is standard for the territory. And none of it amounts to anything all that novel or compelling.
#Manhole: C
Femme
Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a London-based drag performer, is attacked viciously by a group of men one night after a show. Traumatized, Jules stops performing and distances himself from his friends, spending most of his time alone in his flat playing Street Fighter. Some time later, Jules stumbles upon one of his attackers, Preston (George MacKay), who he discovers is closeted. Jules decides to pursue Preston romantically in order to post revenge porn of Preston online and in the process out him to his homophobic friends.
Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme spends little time interrogating why Jules would choose to follow Preston (fearfully) to the man’s flat for their first romantic encounter. The revenge motivation is established, but it acts only as a plot contrivance for what becomes a complicated relationship between the two characters, one in which the ultimate question is whether Jules is developing real feelings towards his assaulter. This relationship is meant to be emotionally weighty and complex, and it is meant to add to the unease of the thriller genre trappings. But it comes off in most instances as wrong-headed, playing a variation on damaging cliches. In the end, the script feels more invested in uneasily redeeming the villain than it does in examining the trauma that such a brutal assault would have on a person.
Although evidently well-meaning, the film never overcomes these cliches, despite evocative performances from Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay.
Femme: C-
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)
CineFiles Movie Reviews 