With "En boucle", Junta Yamaguchi sets off on a wildly playful cinematic merry-go-round

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE

The day begins at the Fujiya Inn, isolated in the heart of the mountains of Kibune, a small village near Kyoto, popular with tourists for its fairytale setting crossed by an enchanting river. Like every day, managers and staff are busy meeting the guests' every need. But very quickly, a feeling of déjà vu sets in and worries: Mikoto, the inn's employee, feels like she's repeating the same gestures, saying the same sentences—and she's not the only one. As panic mounts in the face of this time stuck like a broken record, Mikoto adapts and organizes herself, going to the bedside of disoriented guests.

A genre in its own right in science fiction cinema, the temporal paradox has its canonical model: Groundhog Day (1993), by Harold Ramis, where the same hellish day is replayed indefinitely. In The Loop , by Junta Yamaguchi, this principle is radicalized to the point of absurdity, to be reduced to minutes, at the end of which the sequence returns to its starting point. Two minutes, in other words, the time of nothing. The Japanese director had already explored this device in Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020), unreleased in France, but crowned at numerous festivals.

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