Audience Member
Pastoral Hide and Seek (aka "Pastoral: To Die in the Country" - from 1974) is a stunner. It's stylized theatrical compositions, dream logic and social/psychological observation elevates this work into the realm of great cinema.
Few films are as visually striking and unrelentingly imaginative as this one. Set in a dreamlike rural Japan near a volcanic mountain, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy's attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmaker's desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. The old clock in the mother's house represents tradition and family while wrist watches are individualistic. In the small village; gossiping old women wear sinister eye patches while carrying vindictive stones from a bloody lake. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby, disappears and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake rubber body inflated by a dwarf which gives her sensual pleasure. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.
Shuji Terayama worked in avant-garde theater as well as film, graphics, poetry and prose fiction.
"Pastoral..." is reportedly based on an untranslated book of Haiku by Terayama and is clearly a very personal effort.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/24/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Autobiographical, poetic, analytical, cathartic, honest and masterfully uneven. Terayama is highly influenced by Fellini's take on the disturbed mind of earthly circumstances and adresses it with Jodorowskian surreal elements. This strange hybrid, though, deepens quite enough into the realm of the psyche; it is a neverending speening wheel of philosophy, epiphanies and forbidden passions, an inevitable and prolongued soliloquy to come to terms with oneself's existence which, in the end, provokes nothing more than accepting the surrounding reality, a concept geniously represented by the torn-down walls in the end.
100/100
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Japanese director makes a film about himself and his adolescence. At least I think so. It's something about a boy with a white face and his mum and a circus and a bunch of old women with eye-patches and an inflatable fat lady and well, you get the picture. If there's a line from mainstream film through to oddball and onto surreal, this is at the weird end. I think I'm better with oddball.
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Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
In the village in the foot of [kowayama], I (junior high school student) who doesn't have father live with my mother, two of us. The only enjoyment called father's soul in [itako] and it talked. A young married woman who marries from another place next to my house lives, and it is a man of one's heart. I who did to play was made to hear the thing in the world on the outside from the member, and it came to hold the yearning in the circus that had come to the village one day. I whom reluctance had stung on the current life determined to leave home, and did a promise left from the village with the next married woman that life becomes disgusted similarly. Two people who meet at the station and hit the tie ??? Even here is actually part of the autobiography movie that I now at the time of became a movie director produced. People who had come to the preview praised it was possible to do of the movie, and praised me. Afterwards, I who had entered the snack with the critic was searched for, "If you went back hundreds of years getting on the time machine, and your grandmother three previous in the generation was killed, do you present think it was gone?"I who was deeply considering the meaning of the question meet oneself in the boyhood. I of the boy am dramatized in the boyhood drawn by the movie, and declare it is not true. And, what one a true boyhood was is talked about.
Frenzy [jimiteori] and all circus troupes were actually focused on people who lived in the village of the sex pervert. Leaving home is reported not to have been planned from the married woman seriously, and it is committed a double suicide with mistress's man in the presence. In such and the boy encountered me present. I present came to know how I became it if I past killed my mother. The boy determines to desert mother and to go to Tokyo while talking by two people. However, the virgin is deprived by the inside where the preparation for the departure is straightened and divorced woman [ri] woman from Tokyo. The boy who unbearably became it takes a streetcar, and has left the hometown. After all, the mother killing did not occur. Still, I keep waiting for the boy. However, anything did not change. I present am opposite to mother 20 years ago, become silent, and am eating now. When the wall of the house would collapse before long, the intersection in front of Shinjuku Station there. A lot of men are coming and going in the surroundings. Still, mother and I become silent and eat the rice.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/14/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Extremely bizarre, extremely beautiful, extremely visually stunning, extremely gloomy, and extremely Japanese. Haiku style dialogue and monologue, Ukiyo-e like pictures.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/13/23
Full Review
Audience Member
This might be the most visually stunning film I have ever seen. It just becomes more and more fascinating everytime I watch it. This film is perfect aesthetically, and terayama clearly knows how to work with film and create a complete universe. He plays with fantasy/reality; past and present to tell a quasi-autobiographical story about a young boy in Japan. Probably my second favorite Terayama.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
Full Review
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