Ten Minutes Older – The Cello

One half of a diptych (the whole is dedicated to Juris Podnieks, Hertz Frank and Chris Marker) comprising ten-minute shorts on the theme of 'time'. The episodes in this anthology are broadly conceptual/philosophical; the linking sequences have music played on the cello by Claudio Bohorquez. Bertolucci offers a Buddhist fable on the relativity of time, incorporating a mini-homage to Bollywood musicals. Figgis does his four-screen video thing again, with past, present and future occurring simultaneously in adjacent rooms, to obscure effect. Menzel touchingly juxtaposes shots of the elderly actor Rudolf Hrusínsky with dozens of shots from movies he acted in over his lifetime. Szabó constructs a mini-drama from a planned birthday dinner, a sudden marital separation and an accidental murder. Denis wittily presents a ten-minute dialogue on immigrant 'others' between a philosophy professor and his student on the train - with an immigrant 'other' in the corridor outside. Schlöndorff updates Augustinus with a tale told by an insect about social, sexual and political tensions in the reunited Germany. Radford comes up with a facile sci-fi paradox: an astronaut who has travelled through hyperspace returns to Earth only ten minutes older than when he left, to find his son dying of old age. And Godard (using brief clips from many of his own movies, from Le Petit Soldat to Forever Mozart, plus snatches of Ivan the Terrible, Pasolini's Gospel and concentration camp footage) plays the apocalypse card, taking his allotted time to mark the 'last minutes' of love, memory, silence, etc. The whole package is somewhat less impressive than the companion film.