An older woman seeks revenge on the husband who left her, and the shallow young thing he left her for.
This is the first of Kaneto Shindô's films I've seen in colour, and my first impression is it would have been better in black and white: while many of the same type of shots (and seemingly the same sets) from earlier films such as The Black Cat remain, they no longer feel like captured myth, but instead just an experimentally-shot 70s relationship drama. It all looks a lot more drab and tacky and rooted in the modern era: Nobuko Otowa is as chillingly focused as ever (if underused), but the shots of her running through the woods and the streets in old Japanese costume just look like someone in the modern day playing dress-up, whereas in the earlier films they somehow looked much more like authentic footage from a medieval nightmare.
The films cuts back and forth between presenting the characters as mythical archetypes from the past and the more humdrum present. The man has left his wife to go live in a hotel with a woman he has nothing more in common with than sex, and so much of the film is the two of them just sitting around eating cereal in the nude, while the wife runs around in a wood and hammers nails into a voodoo doll, to little tangible effect.
It all feels quite meandering and self-indulgent, with a number of shots being reused or recreated many times (Nobuko hitting that god-damned tree, for instance). It's a relatively short feature film, but one gets the impression that what story there is could have been told much more effectively in a half hour TV episode instead.
This is the first of Kaneto Shindô's films I've seen in colour, and my first impression is it would have been better in black and white: while many of the same type of shots (and seemingly the same sets) from earlier films such as The Black Cat remain, they no longer feel like captured myth, but instead just an experimentally-shot 70s relationship drama. It all looks a lot more drab and tacky and rooted in the modern era: Nobuko Otowa is as chillingly focused as ever (if underused), but the shots of her running through the woods and the streets in old Japanese costume just look like someone in the modern day playing dress-up, whereas in the earlier films they somehow looked much more like authentic footage from a medieval nightmare.
The films cuts back and forth between presenting the characters as mythical archetypes from the past and the more humdrum present. The man has left his wife to go live in a hotel with a woman he has nothing more in common with than sex, and so much of the film is the two of them just sitting around eating cereal in the nude, while the wife runs around in a wood and hammers nails into a voodoo doll, to little tangible effect.
It all feels quite meandering and self-indulgent, with a number of shots being reused or recreated many times (Nobuko hitting that god-damned tree, for instance). It's a relatively short feature film, but one gets the impression that what story there is could have been told much more effectively in a half hour TV episode instead.
