What delights me most about Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes is its simplicity. Yamaguchi and Ueda make their final movie look impossibly easy, which is always the sign of an insane amount of hard work hidden beneath the surface.
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes marks a feature debut for the theatre troupe EUROPE KIKAKU, who were already cooking up a storm in Japan. On the face of it, the plot of their first movie appeared deceptively simple: a cafe owner discovers a temporal link between the cafe downstairs and his flat upstairs, both linked by two monitors. However, he quickly realises there’s a strange two-minute delay between these monitors, one held in the past and one in the future.
The deceptively simple premise becomes a temporal mind-twister once the gears begin to move, and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes layers past and future on top of one another like a deliciously dangerous cake. But even more impressive are the practicalities of engaging with both your past and future selves in one singular take. It shouldn’t work so effortlessly, but Junta Yamaguchi makes it look like child’s play. This creatively ambitious direction is supported by Makoto Ueda’s brilliantly clever script, which probes its own questions: do any of these people have free will or is everything in the film genuinely self-determined?
Equally impressive is the ease with which Ueda’s script shifts from a time-travelling sci-fi romp to a crime thriller and comedy rom-com while maintaining its creatively complex construction. So many time-travel features take long periods to explain their elaborate rules and problems, but Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes streamlines this by trusting the audience’s knowledge. The only new detail it brings to the table is the Droste Effect, which I, for one, hadn’t heard of until this! Trust me, it is worth a Google if you’re unfamiliar, but even if you’re completely unaware, the film gets the idea across succinctly.
One has to wonder how this devilishly complicated script came into being; maybe they started at the end? Or perhaps it was mapped out on a plethora of whiteboards? What’s clear is that EUROPE KIKAKU has created a masterful marriage of theatre and cinema that many others could only dream of, all in one take. What delights me most about Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes is its simplicity. Yamaguchi and Ueda make their final movie look impossibly easy, which is always the sign of an insane amount of hard work hidden beneath the surface.
Placing creative ambition at the fore while screaming, “To hell with a big budget!” It shoots for the moon and ends up on Mars, and it is the kind of film that millions of aspiring filmmakers dream of creating.
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