In 2003, a filmmaker friend of mine and I decided to attack the BFI London Film Festival in tandem. He was armed with an industry pass and I with a press pass. Apart from the films that I had to write about, the idea was to watch as many films for pleasure as possible, as one does at film festivals. This threw up an interesting problem — if I wasn’t compelled to write about a film, should I stay on till the bitter end of films that didn’t really engage me? And thus the 10-minute test was born with us secure in the knowledge that if it didn’t work in the first 10 minutes, there was always an alternative on the neighbouring screen.
The first film to fail the 10-minute test was a dire Indian-American production whose name escapes me now, but I recall starred Kalpen Suresh Modi, who some of you might know as Kal Penn. My friend and I looked at each other in horror as the horror of those first 10 minutes unfolded on screen and then legged it. This led to two blissful weeks of us walking out of several films, while at the same time we revelled in many others that captured our imagination. The festival also helped us renew our association with Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang, or at least for 10 minutes when we cheerfully walked out of Goodbye, Dragon Inn because a character used all of those 10 minutes to walk very slowly from one end of a cinema to the other. We didn’t realise at the time that characters walking slowly would become a hallmark/signature/obsession, take your pick, resulting in his celebrated (in some niche quarters) ‘Walker’ series where people walk very slowly across cities.
The pitfall of the 10-minute test is obvious. Not every film can grab you in the first 10. There are slow burners that take their time to get going and then reward you. A good example of this would be Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, the best portrait of crumbling aristocracy since The Leopard that also manages to pack in a delirious homage to D.H. Lawrence. And, to return to Taiwan, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films also reveal their charms slowly, with the glorious exception of Millennium Mambo where the opening shot of Shu Qi gliding down an elevated walkway as a mesmeric electronic score throbs on the soundtrack hooks you in mere seconds.
And then there are the award-winning slow burners that the world demands that you like because they are worthy masterpieces. Despite my apprehensions, I was finally persuaded to catch a screening of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palm D’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It passed the 10 minute test simply because I fell asleep. I left the cinema only after I woke up for the third time. Yes, the 10-minute test is severely disrespectful to the technicians who have slaved for years to create their works of art, but I respect those hours of my life that I’ll never see again.
