This compilation of shorts from seven world-class directors is a curate's egg whose segments range from perfectly realised mini-masterpiece to vacuous self-indulgence.
Beginning with a typically mordant slice of Finnish life from Aki Kaurismäki, Ten Minutes Older reaches an early high point with Victor Erice's black-and-white Lifeline, in which a newborn baby's brush with death coincides with the escalation of war in Europe. Werner Herzog's offering is an insightful portrait of a Brazilian rainforest tribe's introduction to the modern world, while Spike Lee's mini-doc We Wuz Robbed takes a forthright look at how Bush "stole" the presidency.
The remainder veer from the inconsequential (Chloë Sevigny as a movie star taking a breather in Jim Jarmusch's pointless contribution) to the baffling (Chen Kaige's Beijing-based parable) to the downright banal (Wim Wenders' trippy tale of an OD-ing driver).
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Perhaps inevitably, given that it lacks a governing aesthetic and sprang from a vague brief (British producer Nicolas McClintock invited his contributors to conjure up "a 10-minute story on the subject of time"), The Trumpet is a rather uneven affair. To its credit, though, it's much richer than the recent 11'09"01, another portmanteau collection, which presented a series of largely irreconcilable perspectives on the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, there are enough flashes of brilliance here to make McClintock's forthcoming follow-up The Cello a mouthwatering prospect.
