Le traquenard

Most people watch this movie after 'Suna no Onna' (Woman In The Dunes). Well, if you compare these 2 movies, the result would be defeat for Pitfall.

What is that? Story builds up, builds up, builds up and... Abruptly ends. There are question marks left over everything. No this is not a movie you can understand with watching it second time like 'Memento'.

I give 5 stars out of respect to the dead/alive ghastly effects for 1960s.

If you're familiar with Hiroshi Teshigahara's work, especially the notorious "Woman In The Dunes", you will understand the starkness, the harsh reality, the irony of this film. Ostensibly about a miner who is stalked by a man in a white suit and who then is killed for reasons that do not become apparent until nearly the end of the film, the film is, like "Dunes", an uncompromising look at life. The film is technically superb on the DVD box available, and it is highly recommended. This film is not for everyone, it is for people who are interested in serious Japanese cinema. There are nuances in this film that show the mark of a great director, though. Again, be prepared: This is not happy go lucky. It triumphs mostly because of its persistence of vision. That is an endorsement for any filmmaker.

Pitfall is slightly reminiscent of a wacky Hollywood comedy with the wackiness the hollywoodness and the comedyness removed. There is a murder, there is a ghost who wants to know why they were murdered, and there are a variety of people running around trying to figure out what's going on.

But unlike some 40s ghost movie, ghosts are powerless to do any more than watch and complain among themselves. And so the movie becomes more the eternal question why must we die then the typical question of who done it.

With its quirky score and offbeat premise the film is often engaging, but some of the plot points are actually pretty ridiculous and it feels like this might have made more sense as a dark comedy rather than an existentialist drama. The movie definitely needed a better ending.

While imperfect, all in all it's pretty absorbing.

This film is very difficult to find in the West. It's not on video and you'd probably have to be lucky and find it at a film festival or a revival house. It's the first collaboration between director Teshigahara, writer Kodo Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu, who went on to make the more widely available WOMAN IN THE DUNES and FACE OF ANOTHER. It's not quite as strong as WitD but is on par with FoA. This is a satire about a deserted town who's inhabitants are ghosts swallowed up by corruption. Teshigahara's direction is solid and Takemitsu comes up with another appropriately dissonant score balancing tension and humor. It's worth seeing for anyone interested in the three principal collaborators, particularly since opportunities to see it are rare. Takemitsu in particular could almost single handedly make a movie worth watching.

Although structurally and aesthetically experimental cinema, Teshigahara's debut proper already carries all the trademarks of an assured author and although a bit rough around the edges here and there it shows a director experimenting with his craft even as he perfects it. Japanese new-wave ferried to its logical conclusion even as it takes its first baby steps.

Based on a story by Kôbô Abe, PITFALL explores the myriad possibilities that emerge from the space where life and death overlap, as a poor miner is murdered under mysterious circumstances in the marshes near an old ghost town. His murderer, an alluring white-clad figure, buys off the silence of the one witness, a woman operating a candy store in the ghost town district, and disappears as mysteriously as he appeared. In the mean time the murdered man wakes up next to his corpse only to discover he's now a ghost.

While THE SIXTH SENSE milked a very similar idea for maximum mainstream appeal, shock twists and shallow thrills, Teshigahara is wise to allow his material to breathe. Even though a very pragmatic subplot about two rival labour unions introduced in the end of act two detracts from the existential nature of the story, like all great storytellers Teshigahara never settles for the convenient and tidy, refuses to explain what the viewer most needs explained. Personal interpretation is very important in any work and particularly in something as haunting as this. Who is the killer? Why is he doing it? Questions left open, the character cleverly typed as a seriocomic grim reaper of sorts riding around in his moped, a manifestation that invokes notions of fate by the very nature of his acts. Is there not meaning when one is not aware of it?

Teshigahara pits the dead against the dead, the living against the living and everybody against each other, ghosts quizically examining their corpses and wondering the reason of their deaths, the living deaf to their protestations and too busy being suspicious of each other. A world revolving around a discordant axis, thrown off balance and left for us to explore its geometry.

Teshigahara's direction reflecting the uncertainty and disorientation of the plot as much as Toru Takemitsu's dissonant score. A POV shot of a child introduced only for the child to walk inside its own POV shot. Jarring jump cuts that send characters jumping through space. Construction works photographed in all their derelict, abandonded glory, a ghost world for the dead to haunt. Notions of hell on earth. The ghost of the murdered man complaining he's hungry as winds rise in the soundtrack. A pack of dogs ascending a steep slope like other Sissyphi. Very precise, very geometric, the work of an assured visual director.