11 minutes is the title of the movie and the duration of the story. The same 11 minutes of the life of every person who lives in a little piece of soil in the same big city, everyone has their own life and their problems, that come together in those 11 minutes in the final twist that will make them protagonists.
It’s such an old idea, the one of a movie that has a peculiar temporal structure and that confirms the accidental influence that everyone has in other people’s lives, a plot that becomes film through the fact of being shown starting from this deconstruction. We won’t say anything about the finale (and its upsetting imaginative poverty), Skolimowski realizes a movie which is empty and filled only with air.
There are different situations: someone who goes for an audition, someone who sells hot dogs, another that takes the dog for a walk, one who delivers drugs, someone that betrays a friend and someone who works as a window cleaner: none of those stories has a real evolution nor a true sense in those 11 minutes. These are little hints, plots that in reality are about to start but that won’t be able to do it, because the movie ends. Therefore, after 11 minutes, what makes a impression on the audience is the concept behind the structure, rather than the single stories or characters. But this structure is nothing but a fiction, it’s a mixture of cards, combined together in order to make them seem more animated than what they are, they are unbearable sketches that would like to be elevated as a paradigm through an ambitious and pompous finale. Using a drastic remedy, Skolimowski presumes to create a sense only by putting feelings at the end, without having built anything. Even the banal metaphore of a dead pixel on a monitor of a video surveillance will gain the last scene: a defitive tombstone on any possibility to value, take seriously or appreciate this empty talk movie.
By Gabriele Niola
Translation by Bianca Baroni
Photos: Alessio Costantino & Eleonora Agostini
In collaboration with Badtaste.it
