-320°F REVIEW – Join Cleopatra, Faust and the Pied Piper on an epic journey | platform

TJapanese writer-director Hideki Noda’s bizarre future fantasy aims high. The film begins with God seeing the Tower of Babel creeping into the sky in the form of a skyscraper. Watch an irreverent satirical drama covering the age of dinosaurs, Cleopatra’s frozen eggs (was she fertilized by Julius Caesar or Mark Antony?) and biotechnology, all through a plot involving time travel, sick angels, and bone communication: the bones of the present-day protagonist, Help (Sadawo Abe), communicate with the fossilized bones through vibration.

The Piper of Hamelin (Koji Okura) appears, as do Mephisto (Suzu Hirose) and Faust (Isao Hashizumi). Noda also fulfills her role as a researcher in the violent world of genetics. The primary preoccupation is the ethics of eliminating disease and creating the “ultimate” human. The story was partly inspired by the mass killings that took place at a nursing home in Sagamihara, outside Tokyo, in 2016, by a former employee who wanted people with disabilities to “disappear.” Help, a D/deaf type, takes a bumpy, Back-to-the-Future-style journey into the past in order to connect with the bones that make up humanity’s legacy and further medical discoveries.

Or something like that, because the plot oscillates between dreams, fantasies, experiments with laboratory rats (a great comedic group), ancient excavations and debates. The turns are so sharp, the sarcasm is so full of adrenaline, it looks like it’s on a drunken high. If you can’t follow along, it doesn’t matter because a lot of it is a fun ride. Highlights include a set piece with dancing bananas. There is great choreography by Shigehiro Ide and physical theater when the set becomes the fossilized bones of a dinosaur. In these moments, he shines and shines.

Yukio Horyu’s set design features panels that bulge out to make characters disappear or reappear, along with video technology that takes us into a tall building and gives the illusion of frequencies switching in time. It’s a marvel of show design (designed by Taiki Ueda), never overdone, with stunning costumes (designed by Kodue Hibino) and vibrant performances.

But it’s hard to keep the sarcasm and whimsy going for more than two hours without a break. It becomes over-the-top serious, which is at odds with the previous chaotic comedy. However, you still walk away feeling as if you’ve entered the ridiculous TARDIS of Noda’s imagination – and with the idea of ​​a phone box at the beginning.