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Hiroshi Teshigahara trying on styles. "Stand still like a telephone pole and a dog will piss on you." It begins in darkness and moves toward marshes and craters, the landscape (hills like piles of excavated dirt) is punctuated by the occasional power lane. Every Kafka needs a patsy, here it's a coal miner (Hisashi Igawa) on the run with his son (Kazuo Miyahara) while a stranger in white suit and gloves (Kunie Tanaka) snaps pictures in the distance. They converge at a deserted town, where a fine image of a store owner (Sumie Sasaki) using chopsticks to pluck ants from a plate of food into a bowl of water shows Woman in the Dunes already formed in the director's mind. In the middle of a critique of capitalist exploitation, a taciturn satire of Japanese ghost yarns, or vice-versa. The protagonist is stabbed and his spirit arises via reverse-motion (Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête), he contemplates his own corpse and stumbles for answers. ("The more you find out, the deeper the mystery," warns a fellow specter.) The dead man turns out to be a ringer for the Old Pit boss, who clashes with the New Pit boss (Sen Yano) until suspicion annihilates both. The industrial scheme goes "exactly as planned," the proprietress joins the miner in impotently screaming at their killer. "Being invisible might have been useful when I was alive, but this in unbearable!" The surreal arrangement has a pair of workers idly discussing reincarnation (one would like to return as a union leader, the other a demon), the metaphor is an empty street suddenly peopled by powerless phantoms. Left among the bodies, the boy stuffs his pockets with candy and disappears into a desolate tableau. With Hideo Kanze, Kei Sato, and Kanichi Omiya. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |