昆虫学者(岡田英司が演じる)は砂漠での遠足に出かけますが、誤って帰りのシャトルバスに乗り遅れてしまい、砂漠の小さな村に閉じ込められてしまいます。 彼は未亡人(岸田京子が演じる)の家に落ち着き、楽しませた後、外の世界への道が塞がれていることに気づく。 彼は村のあらゆる奇妙な出来事をゆっくり観察した。例えば、村人全員が毎晩砂をかき出して家が砂に埋まらないようにしなければならず、すべての水が管理され、配給制が実施されていることなどだ。 彼を引き取った未亡人は自分の体で彼を誘惑し、家族を再編成しようとしました。彼は何度も逃げようとしましたが失敗し、表面上は空虚で見下した態度を装い、村に入って定期的に働き、配給された生活を楽しまなければなりませんでしたが、心の中では常に逃げ出す計画を立てていました。 ある日、未亡人は突然体調を崩し、医師によって予期せぬ妊娠と診断され、皆が急いで彼女を病院に運び、男性はついに一生に一度の逃げ出の機会を得ました......
映画化された原作や関連書籍を読んで、映像との違いや独自の世界観を楽しみましょう。
監督: 勅使河原宏
脚本: 安部公房
音楽: 武満徹
制作: Tadashi Ôno / 市川喜一
撮影監督: Hiroshi Segawa
制作会社: Teshigahara Productions / TOHO
- to me utterly & completely incomprehensable that this movie has been so neglected , Not included in - more 'popular' -watchlists ( or 'best movie' -lists ... ) - it is a Grand Feast for the eyes and the mind : the story , the acting , the photography is of such superb level !!! - i would hot hesitate to rate it ( - actually with many movie-'professionals' ... ) as among the top twenty best ( cinema-proper ) films ever made .
Yikes, but for a film almost entirely set outdoors it’s remarkably claustrophobic! It’s about the exploring bug hunter “Jumpei” (Eiji Okada) who finds himself a bit lost out in the sand dunes after he misses the last bus of the day. A friendly villager offers him some shelter for the night, buy boy is he ill-prepared for quite what that man, and his entire village, has in store. He is placed with a widow, but when he wakes in the morning discovers that her home is deep within a sand well and the only way out is the ladder he climbed down to enter - and that’s gone! It’s a precarious existence for this women (Kyôko Kishida) for if she doesn’t keep the sand levels down, they will swamp her home and swallow her up. The villagers assist in so far as they help dispose of the collected sand and they provide her - and now him - with some weekly rations, but she has no inclination to leave her pit and they seem content to watch him scratch about in the sand just as he was to look at creatures with more legs doing the same. Gradually a bond starts to build between the two, but he is always on the look out for a means of escape, and his captors know that - exacting some torrid vengeance upon both of them as a sort of sport after an attempted escape goes awry. In the end, he begins to realise that it’s distinctly possible that he, she or both may die in the hole and his options aren’t getting any better from day to day. It’s really quite a cerebrally gruesome film to watch this. To see two human beings toyed with as a cat would a mouse is a tough watch and both actors really do deliver strongly, imbuing their scenario with respective senses of acceptance and frustration. At times there are almost cruelly pagan elements to the behaviour on display here, but it is also just possible that there is a scintilla of goodness intended somewhere along the line, too? It’s tautly directed and the sparing but increasingly frenetic dialogue really helps to create a feeling that actually made me feel a little breathless at times. Maybe next time you walk along the beach, you’d best take an escape kit!
