Anyone who loves a good Japanese time-travel comedy has seen, whether they realized or not a film written by Makoto Ueda, the founder of theatre collective Europe Kikaku. He has not only turned some of his own plays into screenplays (e.g. Summer Time Machine Blues (2005)), but also created original stories for cinema (Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020), River (2023)) and some adaptations (Rewrite (2025)).

However, for his latest film You Are The Film, Ueda did not only serve as screenwriter, but also took the director’s seat. Can Makoto Ueda please audiences with his take on the concept of the multiverse? Yes, of course.

Makoto Ueda’s narrative commences when Madoka (Marika Ito), writing a play for her small-time acting-troupe in Shimokitazawa at a local cafe, accepts the boss’ movie-recommendation and heads to Tollywood, a nearby mini-theatre, to catch an indie movie called Sangenjaya escape, a film about a band-member who is forced by some goons to recover the money Mikoshiba (Shintaro Kanamaru), one of its members, stole.  

At the same time, Kazuma (Kai Inowaki), a member of a rather unpopular band called Salopettesazie based in Sangenjaya, is also heading to Tollywood, a mini-theatre, to catch a film called Shimokitazawa Exodus, a film who follows a female playwright as she tries to save her acting-troupe and their new production.   

Seated in the cinema to enjoy a good B-film, a sense of shock washes over Madoka when she realizes that the film featured within the film about the band-member concerns her. Kazuma, on the other hand, is shocked when the protagonist of the film he is watching responds to his comments.

In You Are the Film Ueda plays with the idea that a two-dimensional filmic frame gives birth to imaginary worlds, non-existing spaces – world and spaces that, at a phantasmatic level, keeps existing beyond the frame – and with fantasy spectators have of entering such non-existing spaces. What if films are mere fictionalized presentations of certain narrative realities? What if the screen becomes a two-way window of projection instead of a mirror-like surface of projection? What if, due to certain problems, two of these fictionalized presentations start dripping into each other and become interconnected (Narra-note 1)?

Ueda, luckily, does not merely rely on these conceptual questions to deliver a fun formal exercise. By combining the idea of filmic worlds, worlds ‘existing’ beyond the frame, with the productive yet ill-conceived idea that the cinematic experience resembles our theatre-like experience of our dreamworld, Ueda is able to exploit Freud’s idea that the dream within a dream offers a “representation of (…) reality” for the subject (Freud, 1953, p 338). In this sense, we can argue that the fictional filmic frame confronts both Madoka and Kazuma with their own reality, the reality of their own subjective position.

The shock that washes over them, however, reveals a major difference between Freud’s elaboration of the dream within the dream and Ueda’s transposition of this dynamic to the cinematic space. While the redoubling of the dream is an unconscious attempt to rob what is dreamt within the dream of its reality (Freud, 1953), the encounter with the film within a film ends up heightening reality, reflecting quite brutally something back of their own subjective truth.

While the former is a form of repression, the latter constitutes a “psychotic” return of the repressed – the Other signals the refused truth on the silver screen. The mere shift from private theatre to a public space inaugurates a space that complicated the subject’s continuous attempt to misrecognize his unconscious – his rejected truths – and allow “the subject [to] receive[…] his own message in an inverted form” by an Other (Lacan, 1966, p 38).

Things, however, are a bit more complicated as neither Madoka nor Kazuma are passive observers of the film within the film; they both perform their own film within the film of the other. However, the mere consciousness of the fact they perform their reality for an Other keeps the gap open for the subject to question himself and those who surround him. 

The very fact that they are spectators of each other’s film, moreover, enables them, like a kind of all-perceiving Other, to inform the subject-performer of what he/she has failed or has been unable to notice. The space of the cinema-theatre, thus, transforms into a dialogical space that makes the main character overly-conscious of the role he plays within his/her own narrative, of his own implication within the events that unfold and of his blindness with respect to himself and others. In this sense, the absurd set-up ends up pushing subjects towards subjective rectification – from passive blind victims to perceptive agents, from silent conspirators to divulging subjects. 

However, Ueda would not be Ueda of he did not spice up the psychological dimension of his film with some straight-up absurdity. These absurd turns, some genre-related, work well within You Are The Film because the spectator is aware that film, despite evoking imaginary world, is fiction; that the act of making a film is, in essence, a grammatical operation of fictionalization. It is, moreover, via these absurd turns that Ueda re-emphasizes that the spectator, just like his main characters, is the writer of their own filmic reality. The whole finale is, in this sense, a celebration of subjective rectification, a subtle push to not meekly accept our script as already written, but become the active writer of a script that is being written.       

Ueda brings his narrative alive with a pleasant sense of dynamism. The visual flow that results from his effective reliance on dynamism is not merely pleasingly fluid, but also ends up inviting the spectator into the narrative.

It is also evident that Ueda does not merely dynamism for dynamism’s sake. The use of the voice-over, beyond temporally ordering the concatenation of scenes, reveals that Ueda’s dynamism turns around his main character(s). Dynamism serves both to emphasize the physical presence of the characters within the narrative space as to emphasize their subjective presence. Ueda also utilizes compositional dynamism playfully to emphasize the narrative re-doubling – the inter-locking repetition of narrative frameworks. However, as the narratives unfold and start diverging, such compositional similarity quickly dissipates.

Some time ago, some people lamented that cinema was dead, yet Makoto Ueda proves with You Are The Film that cinema is alive and kicking. Fun, absurd, full of heart – and potentially transformative for the spectator. You Are the Film is a must see. So, what are you waiting for? Get your tickets!

Notes

Narra-note 1: At one moment, the Master of Good Heavens (Gota Ishida), who is trying to remediate the accidental linking of two filmic spaces, explains it via the signifier mobius strip. However, this signifier does not make much sense as the two filmic spaces, despite being strangely nested into each other, remain separate. There is a clear border, a clear inside and a clear outside.

References

Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4, pp. 1–338). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900).

Lacan, J. (1966) Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’. In J. Lacan (2006) Écrits (translated by Bruce Fink). New York: WW Norton.