Like all time loop films, Junta Yamaguchi’s Japanese film River is cute and annoying at the same time. Unlike other well-known time warp comedies like Back to the Future and Groundhog Day, River has a flow of inevitability about it. As though time is water flowing in its own course.Perhaps the above description makes River sound far more profound than it really is. Reality, in fact, is treated with ground-level contempt, as one after another the characters keep repeating their acts every two minutes.Now, this on the script level, must have been an impossible idea to execute. How could the director Yamaguchi make the characters do the same things over and over again without the audience getting board? At one point, one of the myriad characters (don’t try keeping track of who’s who, just go with the flow) expostulates, “I just took a dump. Does this time loop thing mean it goes back inside me?”That bit of vulgarity apart, River is considerably decorous and slightly crazy. Although it moves at is own rhythm, it eventually catches the drift of its characters’ two-minute time loop dilemma. Just how director Yamaguchi keeps the repetition from getting repetitive is to be seen the multi-interpretation of the sequences.ALSO READ: Each two-minute shot is filmed in one take, making River a bit of a marvel in time-capture. The characters are a bit of an irritant, they are either bowing and being over-polite to one another (a Japanese trait) or they are screaming and ranting about how they would never get out of the time trap. Happily for us, the experience is pleasant most of the way. And at 1 hour 24 minutes, we don’t feel the weight of time.The events that unfold happen in a picture-postcard idyllic town of Kibune where time, in any case, stands still. The victims of the time trap are locked in an inn where the waitresses huddle and giggle together and shut their eyes coyly when a guest walks out in a towel.Midway, the narration becomes a love story between a waitress (Riko Fujitani) and the resident chef who wants to migrate to France to learn French cooking. Hence the time loop... What an ingenious way of stopping a loved one from going way!At times, the film feels like a doll’s house with the characters ambling around daintily. Cute and harmless, but also over-sweet and pointless.