BEYOND THE INFINITE TWO MINUTES (2020)
Time for a brief excursion into the sub-genre of Japanese causality loop movies. Which seems like an oddly specific thing to exist but something that's impossible not to be absorbed by with films like Fish Story and Summer Time Machine Blues. The latter is of particular interest here since it has the same writer, someone clearly interested in the most mundane and quirky time travel stories possible. However, while Blues had a breezy after school club vibe, making it well worth seeing, this shares the ultra low budget single-take feel of One Cut of the Dead. Which is also well worth seeing, spoiler free. How does this particular movie fair against so many other strange goings on?
Would-be musician Kato (Kazunari Tosa) runs a coffee shop and lives in an apartment upstairs, which is where all the trouble begins. For reasons that are never explained he arrives home to find that his television is on, and it's connected to another one below in the café. On the screen he sees himself, two minutes in the future. To prove this his future self helps find a missing guitar plectrum, and of course his current self, in the present, soon heads downstairs and repeats this time loop by helping himself, two minutes in the past. How did this happen and why does each screen have a camera? Don't even worry about it and just try to enjoy yourself.
More questions are raised when it becomes apparent that both of the screens can be brought into the shop together, to face one another, in an effort to see a mirrored view of the past and present stretching out forever. Or at least as far as the small TV view will allow... in two minute increments. Why do these screens have such long power cables that never need to be disconnected? Again it's best not to think that hard about it. The real complications arise when Kato's friends show up and start trying to use the phenomenon for more than just funny magic tricks. Soon the bizarre paradoxes start to pile up even if the single location is always the same.
As you'd expect things start small with ways of proving that what they call a 'Time TV' really does what it does. Instead of investigating how and why the group want to buy lottery tickets and become rich, or find out if romance is waiting in the future. Eventually things like small time criminals from a neighbouring apartment, Kato's crush from a shop next door, and what appear to be two cult members, crash the party and cause an escalation of problems, but it's all done with an sense of awkward comedy. Everyone seems blind to problems except the guy who discovered it who is soon regretting the whole thing.
Of course outside the low budget shenanigans there also some standard questions about fate and free will. In more than one instance the characters act out the results of their experimentation just because they saw it happen already two minutes earlier. There's not a huge amount of depth to the story but it's got enough charm to get by without becoming another Primer. If anything it's more about making choices and moving forward instead of being shy or inactive after past failures. Best of all the whole thing is only about seventy minutes long so it's perfectly brisk.
In a way the short running time and lack of sets are a bonus for a film with a simple concept. It's all done with one take (barring a couple of sneaky hidden cuts) and it only has a limited amount of room (in terms of the concept rather than just the building) to explore. Diagrams sketched in chalk are very quick and discussions about big ideas and science fiction are fleeting. Which is perfect for a tale without big special effects and set pieces, beyond a few gags right out of Bill and Ted. It's a silly idea done in what is essentially very boring manner, but it's got plenty of heart and overall the execution is perfect.
4/5
