So. How am I going to do this?
I am attempting to review Once Within a Time, the new film by Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio. Usually, when reviewing a film, I’ll start with a description of the plot. Once Within a Time doesn’t have one of those. I’ll describe the characters, the actors who play them, and their relationships with one another. Once Within a Time does have characters, at least according to the credits, but they are almost impossible to describe, and may or may not exist within the same plane. (One of them, it must be said, is played by an actor who I promise you’ve heard of– we’ll get back to him). Even for a filmmaker whose best-known work is a series of dialogue-free images played at varying speeds, Once Within a Time is not a conventional film; indeed, at 52 minutes, it is only debatably a feature film at all. Terms like “good” or “bad” are largely beside the point when it comes to films like this (he said, as if there were “films like this”). Instead, I will do my best to describe Once Within a Time, and I suspect you’ll be able to glean pretty quickly whether or not this is a film for you.
Following a prologue featuring a tree-like diva voiced by Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim, the film begins with children playing in some sort of gauzy dreamscape. They are approached by a man in a giant apple costume with flailing robot arms, followed by a strange little man whose head is surrounded by an oversized set of foam teeth (I believe this character is the “Storyteller,” but, again, the lack of dialogue makes it tough to say for sure). Suddenly, their world is invaded by malevolent, glowing smartphones. The imagery becomes apocalyptic, and the soundtrack is overcome with roaring chatter and the familiar notification sounds of the social media landscape. There is a mime dressed as a white ape, and a real ape wearing a virtual reality headset. In one of the film’s most cogent moments, the world literally burns around a nuclear family, who are distractedly scrolling on their respective devices around a table inside a giant hourglass.
In case it isn’t clear, this is not the subtlest of parables; it is a film in which an army of cellphones spill out of a technology-laden Trojan horse and latch themselves onto children (in fairness, there is also some imagery whose meaning I genuinely cannot parse, such as the dancing wooden doll with the face of Greta Thunberg). But Once Within a Time won me over, and I can tell you the exact moment that it did. Toward the end of the film, a group of children are led into an arena by a mysterious, cloaked figure identified in the credits as “The Mentor,” who, upon shedding his hood, is revealed to be Mike Tyson. When I say this, I don’t mean that the Mentor is a Mike Tyson-like figure, nor is it a bit of repurposed stock footage or CGI. I mean that former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson is actually in this movie, as an actor, on set, directed by arthouse legend Godfrey Reggio. Mike Tyson begins dancing around, mugging shamelessly and making Charlie Brown grown-up noises with his mouth, as children laugh and dance around him. It’s such an inspired bit of lunacy, and so unexpected, that I found myself dropping the defenses that had been telling me that this was a lot of heavy-handed nonsense. It is heavy-handed nonsense, but it’s so freewheeling and uninhibited and really and truly strange that I ultimately found it difficult not to love.
It also looks stunning. Reggio and his team created the dreamlike aura of the film by utilizing an AI-driven pastel rotoscope filter, recalling the hand-colored silent films of Georges Méliès (Méliès is quoted directly in one of the film’s best images, in which a pack of wolves howl at the anthropomorphic moon from A Trip to the Moon, which is displayed on a gigantic iPhone jutting out of the ground like the monolith in 2001). Though obviously suffused with technology, the film has a strange out-of-time feel, as if it were an ancient artifact from a forgotten alternate timeline. The visuals are matched, of course, by a typically woozy score from longtime Reggio collaborator Philip Glass. Once Within a Time is very unlike anything Reggio has done before, yet his eye is still unmistakable.
I saw Once Within a Time at a preview screening at the Coolidge, followed by a Q&A with executive producer Steven Soderbergh and co-director Jon Kane (interestingly, “co-director” is Kane’s official credit, following Reggio’s “Written & Directed by”). Soderbergh describes himself as the film’s “angel,” largely funding the movie knowing full well it would in no universe turn a profit; Kane comes off as a sort of Sancho Panza to Reggio’s Quixote, trying to figure out ways to realize the master’s increasingly outlandish visions. Both men, when describing working with Reggio, develop something of a thousand-yard stare, as if they still haven’t quite figured out how they got roped into this. According to Kane, Reggio conceived the film as a “3D IMAX movie for kids,” and while budgetary concerns obviously shaved off those first two descriptors, the latter half really pulled the film into focus for me. Children can be more attuned to the avant-garde than adults give them credit for, and while Once Within a Time lacks the cohesion an adult moviegoer might expect, the way it whizzes from one idea to another is legitimately childlike. Reggio and Kane screened Once Within a Time for a few different “focus groups” made up entirely of children, and by all accounts they were delighted and enthralled. I don’t know how many parents will think to plop their kids down in front of the new film by Godfrey Reggio, but I want to believe that some will; it is, at the very least, a step up from endless unboxing videos and Cocomelon.
To be clear: there is a very good chance that you will hate this movie, or at least run out of patience for its aggressive strain of whimsy. But if you’re anywhere close to Reggio’s cockeyed wavelength– or just in the market of something you well and truly haven’t seen before– Once Within a Time could just as easily be your favorite movie of the year. In either event, its very existence is something to be celebrated. Godfrey Reggio is one of cinema’s last true eccentrics, a junkshop wizard who, like Kenneth Anger or Harry Smith, appears to view filmmaking as a ritual incantation as much as an artform. Whatever you think of Once Within a Time, one thing is certain: you’re not likely to see anything else like it anytime soon.
Once Within a Time
2023
dir. Godfrey Reggio & Jon Kane
52 min.
Opens Friday, 11/10 exclusively @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
