FrightFest review – You Are the Film

FrightFest review – You Are the Film

A sweet, strange fantasy from writer-director Makoto Ueda – who scripted Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River – which at once explores matters of cosmic significance and the concerns of struggling independent artists in a media landscape where gigantic corporations dominate.

Playwright Madoka (Ito Marika) and musician Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) have similar struggles with collaborators who want to quit their small-scale theatre group and as-yet-unpopular band – and opt to get away from their problems for a while by taking in a film at the tiny Tollywood cinema.  Each finds themself the only customer in an intimate screening room, though logically they ought to be together … but they live in different realities, and each perceives the other as the lead character in a film they’re watching, with the additional complication that they can talk to each other, and even tell each other’s futures by reading from the glossy brochure handed out at the cinema counter which synopsises the plot.  Each nips in and out of their Tollywood, aggravating the doppelganged manager, and back to the British-themed café (is it a sly joke that so many posters are in the décor for Irish acts?) in the same complex where their own stories are not only unfolding but taking drastic turns into different genres, with the musicians menaced by gangsters out to get back some counterfeit cash stolen by the sulky lazy guitarist and the theatre troupe upended by the revelation that they’re a minor element of a science fiction fantasy drama involving space wars and fleeing princesses.

A fixer character, who has something in common with the time cops of Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, tries to separate the strands of the multiverse and insists Madoka and Kazuma just sit tight and get through the movies without further fracturing the nested realities … but they just can’t, and eventually this Crisis in Infinite Boutique Cinemas leads to a farcical melding of movie forms.  A real strength of Ueda’s work is that he can do the big ideas but always from the viewpoint of café-level creatives – even with only a few minutes to establish the situations, Madoka and Kazuma are credible and their struggles affecting.  The ‘villains’ of their stories – a collaborator who wants the next production called off because she’s had a TV offer and the guitarist who’s too lazy to learn all the riffs and gets shirty when called on it – feel real too, and not entirely in the wrong … and then the flying saucers show up.  You also have to love a filmmaker who can get something this complex into 68 fat-free minutes.