Curry and I went to see this at the NFT all those years ago. No idea why we chose to go, a blind whim, or perhaps he had done his research. It was, in its way, a revelatory viewing experience which shaped our thinking on The Boat People just as much as Cortazar & co. Little did we realise, cinema ingenues that we were back then, that no-one in the UK was either going to be interested or impressed by a film referencing Teshigahara. As ever, it was a trip returning to see a film that has lingered in the memory over the course of twenty years. The near sadistic brilliance hasn’t waned a bit. I couldn’t help thinking about what the cast and crew must have gone through to film in this relentless jungle of sand. An almost Herzogian process. In many ways this is a classic horror movie. Man who is hoodwinked by callous locals, held captive against his will, starved and brought to the edge of sanity through thirst, flees only to get caught in quicksand. And yet, as the title suggests, it is also a warped love story, of the kind that appears to recur so frequently in Japanese culture.
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