Pastoral Hide and Seek (1975)

Genres - Drama, Fantasy  |   Sub-Genres - Surrealist Film  |   Run Time - 102 min.  |   Countries - Japan  |   MPAA Rating - NR
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Synopsis by Clarke Fountain

This non-narrative film is a phantasmal meditation on director Shuji Terayama's adolescence, living in a small community and overwhelmed by the suffocating demands of his widowed mother. He has a crush on a married woman in the community, who asks him to run away to the big city with her. At some point, the action in the film stops as the director comes into the frame and enters into a dialogue with the representation of himself at age 15. His younger self scolds the older one for his distortions of memory. One of the more striking features of the use of imagery in this film, which is perhaps a metaphor for the intent of the film, is the way in which obvious stage backdrops fall away to reveal real-life settings.

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Keywords

crush, fantasy, reality