Achilles and the Tortoise

The last film in Takeshi Kitano's trilogy about art. Machisu paints. He grows up in a wealthy family and his father encourages him; then the family goes bankrupt and the boy is orphaned. He does not stop painting. The film tells his life in three periods: childhood, youth and old age. In each the same thing happens; Machisu learns a movement in art, imitates it, arrives too late, and the dealer always tells him the same thing: this is no longer current, bring something new. The title comes from Zeno's paradox: Achilles can never catch the tortoise. Nor can Machisu; he runs after art and the distance stays the same. The narrative is funny and merciless at once. His experiments grow more extreme and the people around him pay for them. Kitano directs and plays the older Machisu. He also made most of the paintings in the film himself. An interesting work for anyone who likes Kitano's cinema and films about art. For a viewer who knows Kitano through his crime films, the genre here is something else entirely; the narrative is slow and the humour dry.