Hiroshi Teshigahara

  • Suna no onna [Woman in the Dunes] (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, November 2022) So here we are, in late fall, when tackling down the next few films in my “to watch before the end of the year” list takes precedence over crowd-pleasing entertainment. The next film on The List: Japanese surrealist drama Woman in the Dunes, in which a scientist is pushed into a giant sand pit where he meets a tormented woman and must serve the nearby villagers (who sent him down in the pit, and took away the ladder) by providing them with buckets of sand. Yes, really. I have enough problems relating to black-and-white Japanese films of the 1960s filled with action and spectacle that this arthouse special was a bit of an ordeal. It’s not so much the weird topic (I’ve seen much, much weirder), but the execution that takes its toll—specifically the almost unbearable two hours and a half it takes from beginning to end. There isn’t enough plot here to justify that running time, and that’s clearly an avowed feature of the film: Director Hiroshi Teshigahara (working from a screenplay by Kōbō Abe, adapting his own novel) clearly means this to be a slow-cinema kind of thing, a meditative experience that gives the viewer time enough to reflect on the allegorical nature of the film. But what will work splendidly well with other viewers just felt obnoxious to me—while I could appreciate some of the sandy cinematography, the rest of Woman in the Dunes didn’t give me any reason to play along with its symbolic games or social parables. At least, at the end of the credits, I can at least say I’ve seen it. One less film on the checklist…

  • Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] (1966)

    Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) While The Face of Another is not quite presented with the trappings of genre horror or science fiction, there’s a lot more to this story of facial disfigurement than just another drama. There are a considerable number of thematic concerns brewing under the surface of a story about a man getting a lifelike mask after receiving facial burns, and using the mask as an excuse to live another life. There are clear musings on identity, on the face we present to the world versus true selves, and what happens when accountability-through-identity is stripped away. The plot itself doesn’t make much sense on a logical level (despite insistent nuts-and-bolts realism, especially in the first part), which must have infuriated critics of the past fifty years. On the other hand, the film becomes far more poignant as an allegorical piece in which ideas are made literal through Science-Fictional devices. The Face of Another’s classification as a piece of Japanese New Wave cinema finds its meaning in the way the film eventually becomes stranger and weirder as it goes one, blending in another story, leaving realism behind and presenting a somewhat glum picture of humanity once individuals are freed of their identities. (I’m not saying that writer Kōbō Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara are wrong, especially after the past thirty years spent on the Internet — but it’s not a happy film by any means.)  I can’t say I liked the result, but it did keep me far more interested in the proceedings than purely realistic Japanese cinema of the same era, so consider this more than a half-hearted recommendation. See it alongside Les Yeux Sans Visage for more masking fun.