Cast:
Eiji Okada (Niki Junpei), Kyōko Kishida (the widow in the dunes), and Kōji Mitsui (the village elder) Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Review:
Did you know the first Asian director to be nominated for an Academy Award was actually Hiroshi Teshigahara? Born in Chiyoda in Tokyo as the son of Sōfū Teshigahara (a founder of ikebana school Sōgetsu-ryū, which deals with flower arrangement), he went straight to working in film after graduating from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, starting with documentaries and shorts before his first feature with Pitfall (1962), which was an adaptation of a television play by Abe. With this film, Abe wrote the film as based on his own novel of the same name, which had been published to considerable attention in 1960 (which you can interpret in places such as this). The movie had two different versions: a 147-minute version and a 124-minute trimming that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director (strangely, those nominations were a year apart from each other, which is how one loses to Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow one year and Robert Wise directing The Sound of Music in the next year); the next Asian to be nominated for Best Director wouldn't be for another 20 years. He ultimately directed a handful of films and documentaries (which included two further adaptations of Abe works) until 1992 while also keeping busy as an artist (such as ikebana and calligraphy). Teshigahara died in 2001 at the age of 74.
Admittedly, calling the movie a peculiar experience is an understatement. You might as well call it a movie where insects lie in the sand that makes you feel each and every minute stuck in rawness. You feel every grain of sand and every bit of trapping in trauma that grinds away perhaps just as much as life grinds one to either work to survive or to survive to work. To live is to entrap oneself somewhere, and it really can come down to just big one chooses to dig for themselves in the guise of identity. Escape might as well just be a word that translates to "futile". The movie relies so much on the dynamic between Okada and Kishida in all of the conviction required in selling the illusion of what matters most of flight and punishment (okay, I'm paraphrasing from the sentence that precedes the book in there being no joy in flight without threats of punishment, but I think you get it). One craves meaning and will look anywhere to get that meaning, whether that involves passion drenched in sand or otherwise. Is it damnation or salvation that one experiences with a film all about form? At a certain point with these two, they might as well be thought of as one entity among themselves that is within a space of illogic logic (one wonders if they would be so lucky to experience such breathtaking visuals that occur here, naturally). Kishida sells that tragedy of living in the pit of all pits with efficiency. Sure, one might call themselves free with what they do (or don't do) compared to others, but everyone is grinded up the same way in the end no matter how many paths they try to take for themselves. The music contributed by Tōru Takemitsu only lends further curiosity into how one could craft such an unnerving time for anyone to experience for themselves. An "avant garde" movie through and through, what you get here is a pretty intense movie. It hits most of the notes required for a movie you just have to experience in the realm of elusive claustrophobia that will surely stick in one's senses for time to come.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
Well, I assume it is a good time to list an upcoming slate of reviews in the coming days: J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear and Alex Cox's Repo Man.
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