The story centers on a group of young people who travel back in time when they are in a movie theater just before closing time. They witness deaths during the closing days of Japan’s feudal times and on the battlefront in China before they are sent to Hiroshima just before the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of the city.
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is a Japanese filmmaking legend. His filmography, spanning 60 years, includes over 60 titles, most of which he helmed, along with scoring, shooting, editing, and producing. Known for his deeply surreal filmmaking style and conspicuous anti-war messages, Ôbayashi, who passed away last year, revisits the history of Japanese warfare in the equally berserk and disappointing “Labyrinth of Cinema.”
Although he’s dabbled in more mainstream fare, Ôbayashi’s return to full-on experimental mode is evident from the first colorful frames of this three-hour-long endurance test. A man called Fanta G (Yukihiro Takahashi) waxes existential in a spaceship, eating a giant sushi roll, while pianos, fish, babies, and planets float around him. “That’s Earth, our home,” he says. “But people destroy this tiny sphere, fight wars and kill each other. It’s unbelievable.” Indeed.
He lands on our blue marble and ends up in Onomichi — the seaside town where Ôbayashi grew up and shot many films — in a movie theater, with a live orchestra and a particularly animated audience. After lightning strikes the building, some members of the audience find themselves transported into the screen. And therein begins the long, arduous, frantic, tiring journey, our heroes hopping between Japanese films of every genre.
Many will certainly be put off by all the insanity: abrupt editing, non-linear narrative, non-sequiturs, ultra-stylization, the breaking of the fourth wall, eye-gouging visuals, switching from black and white to color, and back, and, well, this list goes on and on. I won’t blame them. “Labyrinth of Cinema” is way too visually, mentally, thematically, and aurally unstable to truly explore or pay respect to the classics it purportedly admires so much — which prominently include yakuza flicks, silent movies, westerns, and film noir. The entire thing rapidly collapses under the weight of its pretensions, and then there are two-and-a-half more hours to go.
True to its title, “Labyrinth of Cinema” is an odyssey through cinema, but a surprisingly childish one, relying heavily on slapstick jokes, screechy sermonizing, and poor SFX, and consequently verging on lackluster. There are some chuckle-inducing moments here and there, and the filmmaker’s colossal background shines through intermittently — but those fragments are barely worth sitting through the migraine-inducing plot.
Ôbayashi’s latest and last film fails at two crucial things: it’s neither a scathing critique of warfare nor a love letter to the redemptive power of cinema. Its audience, unlike its protagonists, will most likely walk right past the silver screens and leave the theater.
“Labyrinth of Cinema” will be released at The Metrograph in New York on October 20th and in Los Angeles at The Lumiere Cinema on October 29th (co-presented by Acropolis Cinema) with a nationwide theatrical release to follow.
