Pastoral: To Die in the Country

Pastoral: To Die in the Country (田園に死す), also known as Pastoral Hide and Seek, is a 1974 Japanese drama film directed by Shūji Terayama. The film employs a film-within-film structure, depicting a young man (a stand-in for Terayama) wrestling with the film he is attempting to complete - a reimagination of his adolescence. It was entered into the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.

Prologue
Six children play hide-and-seek in the countryside. After the five run off to hide, the child chosen to be it begins to look for the children, but instead, five adults emerge.

Film-Within-Film
As a 15-year-old, the protagonist (referred to hereafter as “Shin-chan”, the way his mother addresses him) lived with his widowed mother in a Japanese village in Aomori Prefecture, at the foot of the Scary Mountain. Shin-chan lusts after the woman who lives next door and witnesses a young woman struggling to deliver her child; the other bystanders murmur that it was conceived out of wedlock. After an argument at home, Shin-chan storms off to the Scary Mountain, where his father is buried. There, he complains about his mother’s nagging to him through an oracle and expresses his desire to run away from home the next spring.

When spring comes, a circus troupe arrives. During a visit, Shin-chan is greeted by a woman who wears an inflatable fat suit for her act and is intrigued by her watch. At home, he begs his mother for one but she refuses, claiming that the time must be kept at home, inside their big, family clock (which is broken). One spring day, while horsing around, Shin-chan attracts the neighbor’s attention. He tells her that he has never been on a train, so she admits to being dissatisfied with her marriage and offers him a chance to run away with her on a train by asking him to help her elope. Meanwhile, the woman Shin-chan witnessed in difficult labor is proudly showing off her baby girl. One night, after his mother has fallen asleep, Shin-chan escapes with the neighbor.

Frame Story
The screening of the portion of the film that has been fully edited ends. The protagonist, as an adult, leaves the screening with a friend and confesses to him that he is facing a creative block; he feels that he is exploiting his childhood by making it the film’s subject and risks turning it into a cheap spectacle, but his friend reasons that fictionalizing the past is the only way to liberate oneself from it. He then raises a hypothetical question to the protagonist - if he were to travel back in time and kill his great-grandmother, would his present self still exist? The protagonist, deep in thought, believes that it is his present self that killed his great-grandmother, except that would mean his grandmother, mother, and himself could not exist.

Upon returning to the editing room, the protagonist finds Shin-chan waiting for him there. He is nervous because he has embellished much of his childhood in the film and cries that his childhood is a pack of lies.

Film-Within-Film Resumed
Exiting the cutting room, the film-within film resumes. The villagers, noticing a birthmark on the woman’s baby, believe it to be a curse and force the woman to abandon the child. The adult protagonist then presents the elopement as it really happened - Shin-chan finds the neighbor with her lover in a hut on the Scary Mountain, but the woman tells him to take the train alone, denying that she ever made any promise to him. She then tells her life’s story. During WWII, her father was called to the front lines and her mother suffered a stroke, so there was nobody to work the fields and nothing to eat. Her mother refused to sell the fields despite offers and, after she died, the fields were sold and the woman went to live with a relative. One night, while out burying her dead mother’s red comb, the comb cried out for the fields and her childhood to be returned. After the war, the woman had to become a prostitute. She often dreamt of her village and each time she plowed, red combs would appear in every field in the village, crying out to the woman that she should never have been a woman, a mother.

Frame Story Resumed
In the cutting room, the protagonist has no idea of how to continue and decides he should go back in time and confront his childhood.

Film-Within-Film Resumed
The adult protagonist returns to the world of his childhood. The villagers interpret a dog’s death as misfortune brought upon them by the baby and they force her mother to kill her. Meanwhile, the lover offers to take Shin-chan along and sends him to get some sake to drink before they leave; on the way, he meets the adult protagonist who asks to accompany him. They return to the hut where they discover that the lovers have strangled themselves to death.

Pursued, the woman tearfully casts her baby down a river. Later, a group of old women in the village mutter that the woman has vanished along with her baby and decry her for committing infanticide. The adult protagonist wanders about the impact of discovering the circus and watches as inside the tent, the circus woman’s husband leaves with his lover and tells her that she will find another man, but she is certain that he will return to her.

The adult protagonist and Shin-chan sit down in a field to play chess. Shin-chan desperately wants to know certain things about his future, but his adult self refuses to tell him, saying that he cannot wait for his younger self to catch up to him because one cannot make time stand still. He also tells him that the past can always be arranged and that because he is young, he can still pick up what his adult self has lost, but he cannot pick up what Shin-chan has lost because too much time has passed. Shin-chan admits to wanting to leave mother; the adult protagonist agrees and says he has always wanted to kill mother from 20 years ago and tells Shin-chan to run to the house to get things to kill her with; Shin-chan protests that he loves mother, but the adult protagonist says that is exactly why Shin-chan needs to do so, and he wants to witness his younger self commit the act.

Along the way, Shin-chan meets the fashionable present-day version of the woman who killed her baby and she rapes him. Ashamed, Shin-chan realizes he cannot return home; the woman offers to take him to Tokyo.

The adult protagonist eventually realizes he has been betrayed by his own past self and that he has to kill mother himself. He enters the house and greets her; she responds as if he were still Shin-chan.

Epilogue
As the adult protagonist and mother sit down to eat, a wall at their sides, he admits that there were other ways to tell all of this, for he and his mother are merely characters he invented for the film-within-film and he realizes that within it, he has not been able to make himself or kill mother. He wonders aloud who he is: born December 10th, 1935, presently located in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, upon the Scary Mountain.

Suddenly, the wall falls back, revealing that they are sitting by a pedestrian crossing in Shinjuku. As they continue to eat and converse, characters from the film-within-film enter the frame, walk by, and disappear among the civilians crossing the street.

Cast

 * Kantaro Suga - Me
 * Hiroyuki Takano - Me, as a boy
 * Yoshio Harada - Arashi
 * Izumi Hara - Phantom of old woman
 * Masumi Harukawa
 * Isao Kimura - Film Critic
 * Kan Mikami
 * Keiko Niitaka
 * Yoko Ran
 * J.A. Seazer - Tengu Kurama
 * Kaoru Yachigusa

Reception
In a 2011 case for the film's release into The Criterion Collection, Robert Nishimura lauded Pastoral: To Die in the Country as "an important film by an important filmmaker". He cited its "effortless phantasmagorical freedom" and referred to the work as "so unique and spellbinding that it transcends all classification."