Achilles and the Tortoise is a Japanese film from Director Takeshi Kitano that follows the life of struggling artist, Machisu, orphaned after his father’s sudden suicide. His parents had indulged him as a creative genius, but once in the real world Machisu finds himself unable to compete artistically in a harsh and unsusceptible society. Stubbornly, he strives to create a masterpiece at the expense of everyone he holds dear.
The story is rooted in creativity and failure, but the narrative losses that Machisu suffers (first his father’s suicide, then his mother’s, then his best friend’s, then his other friend’s, then his daughter’s…) became so repetitive that it lost its capacity for emotional impact and seemed to turn the experience into satirical attack against those who chose such artistic pursuits.
The way that Machisu turns so coldly inhuman would, normally, be attributed to the severe emotional turmoil that life has delivered him, but Kitano blames it instead on the character’s artistic insanity that has left him ravaged and devoid of friends, love, fame, or fulfillment. All of the artworks featured in the film are drastically different from the mise-en-scene that surrounds them, emphasizing their ridiculous nature and obvious misplacement.
The title refers to Zeno’s paradox, implying that Machisu—the stubborn Achilles—will never be able to infiltrate the art world. Until the end, that is, when after Machisu finally throws down his paintbrush and abandons his lifelong pursuit, subtitles state that Achilles finally caught the Tortoise after all. The ending felt cheap and wrong, positioning an ideology that insists that modern art is irrational, visually disturbing, worthless, and disdainful—a statement that feels invalid and disheartening.
One and a half.
