I was mistaken. Not that I was wrong, that theme belongs to another article, but I overestimated the carrying power of unpredictability. I prefer a heavy dose of the strange and unexpected in my art and entertainment. But it turns out that weird needs a capable touch.
Love and Anarchy has come and gone again. Fewer films appealed to me than in past years, but the narrowed focus highlighted an illuminating contrast that might have gone otherwise unnoticed.
Based on the assorted pre viewing ephemera (Is anything ephemeral in our madly archival age?), I would not have thought there much in comparing 11 Minutes and The Boy and the Beast. The first is a thriller touted as mould breaking. The catalogue copy convinced me I would at least be amused by its peculiarities and possibly discover a weird gem. The second is an animated family film written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda, a director I trust to unobtrusively handle the formulaic elements of the genre while twisting things up delightfully.
11 Minutes tells a single event from the point of view of a handful of characters. The broad outlines of the terminal event are usually visible early on in these sorts of films, but the pleasure comes from drawing connections between the seemingly random particulars. Just how does the red thread bind these characters along this measure of ineluctable fate?
The film begins in found footage style, then the camera follows two characters uncomfortably close to the backs of their heads in successive scenes. Suddenly, the camera switches to a dog's eye view of the world. Perhaps the various styles signal something about the perceptual limits of each character? What could be just outside the restrictive frames of each of these angles? Off to a good start.
But soon the director discards these disjoint tricks for an unmarked style, neither tying them to character nor weaving them into plot hints. The discomfiting angles have been a whim like so much else in this film.
Though the film is full of competent actors, the script insists on throwing out quirky tidbits in place of actual character depth. These must be clues in this style of film, right? Why is it relevant that the hot dog seller used to be a professor before he did something that means he has to stay away from schools and causes a girl to spit in his eye?
It's not. None of the random, peculiar ephemera (here ephemeral without doubt) is going to connect at all. The ex-professor's alluded transgression is just a tile in the mosaic of casual sexism serving as a background. There is an underdeveloped dead pixel motif cantilevered precariously from the middle of the film, which you may at times suspect will develop into an aliens or elder god sort of resolution. Alas, no. The arrival of the presaged Rube-Goldberg accident is a relief.
That dangling dead pixel motif does suggest a moral. Life is a series of random occurrences, utterly meaningless. When snuffed out, a life is nothing more than a little black hole betwixt the noise of a billion other lives, all resolving to white static at a distance. If this is the director's theme, then it's lazily pasted on the surface in place of the measured method needed to weave this sort of story effectively.
In contrast, The Boy and the Beast is filled with stock characters. It is also zany and twisty, but not just for the heck of it. The film's unpredictable path rises from developed characters, who have embraced exacting goals, moving through lives filled with choices. Even though it features beast warriors with ultra powers, it's the more realistic of the two films. And it speaks more eloquently about the knots and loops in a length of fate.
After losing both his parents, Ren flees to the margins of Shibuya where a cloaked figure offers to take him on as a student. Following what turns out to be a swordmaster bear into a parallel city peopled by anthropomorphic animals, Ren takes up the study of the sword to help the hot tempered beast compete in a tournament to decide the next governor of the city.
Explaining the side story, subplot, twist, and subsequent second arc would quickly move into spoiler territory. These additional elements are tied into the central train-for-a-tournament storyline with pleasingly subtle knots. Initially happenstance connections between characters are reinforced by years of circling the same goal and prove vital to all successes, once in formulaic style and again in amusingly, yet thematically coherent, idiosyncratic shape.
Expectations about character are subverted. Seemingly incidental details explode into monstrous proportions. A boy goes seven years with a mouse hidden somewhere on his person because why not? Animals take on characteristics of people and people characteristics of animals as boundaries of relatability are symbolically pushed.
Viewing the two films one after the other, illuminated the very different handling of unpredictable and strange events. Insofar as it posits anything at all, 11 Minutes depicts everything as insolubly random, thus meaningless. Consequent, little attempt is made to connect the characters, events, symbols, and themes. In counter, The Boy and the Beast shows that no matter how odd and happenstance the connections between people may be, they are what count when things get weird. Threads once taken up are fully woven into the tapestry no matter how incident their part in the full picture may be.
It's not that I'm philosophically aligned with either of the films' theses. My agnostic temperament will entertain either given the right conditions. More, the films clarified for me what makes the strange work as entertaining art, a commitment to the beauty, toothless or brutal, of the happy pattern in an otherwise random section of drifting lengths of knotted thread.