After Two minutes later, the Japanese director Junta Yamaguchi returns to us for a more soberly titled twin project River. Presented at NIFFF in the Ultra Movies section, it is high time to know if River Is in the flow of the previous feature film or does he just make a big flop?
Passion time loops
With his first feature film, Yamaguchi We had proved that we could make a quality film, distributed (and noticed!) to the international with three times nothing as budget (in this case less than 20,000). $). Of course, the question of the future career arose: how can we renew ourselves after such a realization? And the answer is in River, submitted in advance to the NIFFF.
Lost in a small Japanese village, a hotel adjacent to a wellness centre is trapped in a time loop. But exits the daily duration depicted in One day without endHere it all starts again after only... two minutes! And the whole gallery of characters to find themselves upset by this strange distortion of space-time.
Curved film
Let us start by evacuating the problems associated with this film, which are in a few words the same reproaches that could be attributed to Two minutes later : a filming that leaves something to be desired, not necessarily at the height of the director's formal ambition (a chain of two-minute sequence plans with a camera sticking to the bodies of the actors). The problems of saccades, the visible digital stabilization, a dubious photograph passed to the diffuse filter and a soft belly at the time of the repetition of the escapades of the little couple...
Not anecdotal tares then, but that River brilliantly manages to occult by the force of its device – this time loop filmed in plane-sequence by returning, each time, to the same point centered on the same actress. Devilly rhythmic, the film unfolds an inventory of tricky ideas that prevent the viewer from feeling what the feature film in his heart is: a constant repetition.
Closed
And to explain it, it is impossible not to evoke the crazy spatialization of the feature film. River is in fact concentrated in a hotel-wellness-resort for wealthy people with devilishly intertwined corridors, mixing gogo stairs, scattered rooms and stolen threads. And yet, in a few camera towers, the director manages to make understand all the architecture of this building to his spectator. A tour de force that allows each space area to be assigned its resident (which thus returns to it at each beginning of the loop) and makes the story incredibly easy to follow.
Better yet, River plays totally the expectations of the spectator and totally assumes his desire to explore his history of loop without back-up The underlying scenario. Indeed, if one sees a huge deus ex machina disembarking like a house, it is in the end to use an even larger one afterwards, in a completely uncomplexed way. The confirmation, if necessary, that River is just the trip of a moneyless director wishing (again) to describe his temporal travel history. And God knows if he does it right!
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