Pastoral: To Die in the Country

1974 [JAPANESE]

Action / Drama / Fantasy

9
IMDb Rating 7.7/10 10 2766 2.8K

surreal

Plot summary

A director faces creative block while working on his latest film – a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.

Director

Shûji Terayama Photo
Shûji Terayama

Top cast

Chigusa Takayama Photo
Chigusa Takayama
Kaoru Yachigusa Photo
Kaoru Yachigusa
Hitoshi Ômae Photo
Hitoshi Ômae as (as Kin Ômae)
Isao Kimura Photo
Isao Kimura as Film Critic
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
928.38 MB
988*720
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 40 min
Seeds 2
1.68 GB
1472*1072
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 40 min
Seeds 31

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by M0n0_bogdan 8 / 10

Childhood in cinema.

Childhood is something that cannot ever be exploited.In every film where a childhood is depicted, it's never 1 to 1. It's never reality. Reality is boring and it's not interesting, except for the originator. Shuji Terayama, another director I discovered because of LB, knew this and had to Fellinicise, to Parajanovicise, poeticise, abstracise his childhood. Maybe something thin of reality is still there, but something that's common to all of us.I will not revisit this film, ever. I didn't connect to it and the visual style alone is not something that powerful for me to cling on. But I can appreciate the symbolism of it, the cinematography, the little stories, and what those stories tried to tell, but I will be frank, not all of them were understandable and need multiple viewings to be really digested.Time is another big theme here and somehow present in every scene through watches, ticking clocks, time paradoxes and even cicadas in the background.
Reviewed by propast 9 / 10

Terayama's memories and mythologies

Terayama's mastery of the image is inarguable. His compositions - kaleidoscopic, supersaturated, overpowering - are an integral part of his films' unique emotional landscape. He could almost be described as a director of Japanese kink, were his films not so deeply philosophical, cerebral and achingly emotional.Here, Terayama paints his childhood in broad strokes, then proceeds to shake his head as if disappointed at the results; his images are an embellishment, he concedes, and the rest of the film delves more deeply into the metaphysical as he literally steps foot into his childhood to try to understand it and, if possible, change it, if only to find out what will happen if he does.The film is charged with budding eroticism, a portrait of an adolescent's confusion juxtaposed with a man's midlife existentialism. Terayama was a fascinating man and he's putting his soul on display in this film, his own poetry woven through it as his memories ring with the surreal and come across more coherently as feelings than as literal moments. The figures of his childhood walk larger than life until, finally, the thin walls of memory come crashing down and the past is forsaken in favour of an urban present.
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