Battlefield Baseball, Woman in the Dunes
Jigoku Kôshien aka Battlefield Baseball (2003). Dir. Yudai Yamaguchi. So, you looked at the name of the film. You thought to yourself how amazing Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer is to watch. That is a mistake. A mistake that is further compounded by pressing play on your remote in order to start the film.
Maybe I’m making a big deal of my shattered expectations. This film, if it isn’t clear, is in no way comparable to Shaolin Soccer, except by virtue of the title and the amount of plot description that you can fit on the back of a display case. You might, naively, expect there to be some attempt to show a baseball game, and during this game there might be some ‘battling’ on the field. You would be wrong. This film is far talkier than most relationship dramas and, I must reiterate this fact, there is not a single second of on-air Baseball. Oh sure, there are some scenes where baseballs are thrown, and some of these are integral to the plot. But, they only occur in regards to playing catch and once to superfluously throw a flaming baseball at a building. Not what I would call direly necessary in the context of the nominal plot.
This film would be better characterized as a quirky adaptation of Manga and Anime cliches in the genre of high school sports drama, and a half-hearted attempt at a martial arts film. On almost every single level I felt disappointed by this movie. Which is odd considering I have spent hundreds of hours savoring every ridiculous second of incompetently produced Italian genre filmmaking, but there it is.
To sum up in a few words my advice concerning this one: Do Not Watch.
Suna No Onna aka Woman in the Dunes (1964). Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara. Another Japanese film, Woman in the Dunes is (watch out for falling cliches) a very tight and utterly claustrophobic film. This film concerns an itinerant amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei (played expertly by Eiji Okada) on holiday in an unspecified rural/coastal part of Japan. He is trapped by a woman who lives amongst the beach’s dunes in an insidious but not solely malicious fashion. There’s really not much more to say concerning the plot, what is foremost in my mind is the sheer intensity of the camera work, technically speaking this film is an example of using the camera’s movements, framing, and the set design to intensify every second of footage. I found the experience to be unrelentingly tense, with moments of gasping catharsis, where my own feelings felt closely mirroring that of Okada’s character.
With my faith shaken by Battlefield Baseball, I found myself rejuvenated and exhausted by Woman in the Dunes. Teshigahara is also well-known for the visually stunning The Face of Another, which also comes highly recommended.
