11 Minutes (2016) - Jerzy Skolimowski

A cinematic puzzle that is as intriguing as it is frustrating, Jerzy Skolimowski's 11 Minutes is a purposely enigmatic tale featuring a series of thinly veined characterizations, each of which seemingly has very little connection with one and other besides the timeline and location which they all exist in.  Skolimowski's 11 Minutes is a frantic puzzle that offers very little clues to the exact  connection between its various characters, with a jealous husband, his beautiful actress wife, and a sleazy film director offering the only real semblance of connection throughout the narrative.  While 11 minutes is a frustrating experience at first, where the viewer is completely in the dark,  as the film progresses, it becomes clear that Skolimowski is intentionally offering up these thinly veiled characterizations, providing a  cross-section of contemporary urbanites whose connection itself is limited by sharing the same space.   These characters' lives are exhibited in what could almost be described as vignettes, with the visual aesthetic evoking a sense of surveillance and voyeurism, completely void of context outside of the exact moment in which it documents.   It's only the ending at the very end of 11 Minutes that Skolowski's vision completely came into focus for me, a bombastic display of violence that feels completely out of nowhere.  From a narrative and character perspective the ending evokes very litttle from the audience due to the thinly veiled characterizations, but thematically the film comes into focus, capturing the unpredictability of life, with the filmmaker suggesting that our thinly veiled attempts of safety through surveillance offer up merely a false sense of security.  11 Minutes is frustrating and enigmatic until it isn't, a film that challenges the viewer through much of its 70 minute running time only to pull back the current in its finale and reveal its true intentions.   Skolimowski's camera itself, everything leading up to teh finale of 11 Minutes is a symbolic representation of mass surveillance, yet the death and destruction comes anyway, as we the viewer, much like mass surveillance, struggle to connect the details.   I could certainly understand that some people wiill find the film's strong ending way too little too late, but for me, 11 Minutes' reveals itself as a powerful, angry commentary on surveillance, focusing not so much on the privacy concerns, which are more obvious, but more so on the larger ideal that mass surveillance offers very little ability to protect ourselves from the uncertainty of circumstances of everyday life. 

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