Barren Illusion (1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) just might be his slowest film and that’s saying a lot. In fact that’s likely its most distinctive feature it’s an example of slow cinema if you consider that a thing. It’s also so far as I can tell the only Kurosawa movie without a score.
Speaking of sound design though it does utilize his characteristic drone mesmerizing technique. The bar with ominous ambient repetitive mechanized duct construct sound aurally supports a general repetition motif to be found throughout Barren Illusion. You know the way in the first few minutes the stranger girl being hit on in the bar tells the stranger guy to disappear then the safe thieves scene they tell the guy to disappear then the guy in his flat scene he disappears.
The girl in this thing has definitely got this I don’t know crinkle ASMR leitmotif. Right? When she’s in the music rehearsal space flat the way the sound effect foley of her eating each chip slowly flows into the way the sound of her taking that recycling out similarly crinkles the way she opens the parcel with the dried leaves same.
Barren Illusion feels otherworldly because the guy and girl seem like they’re in purgatory and it does everything it can formally to enhance this troubling premonitorily uneasy abstraction cinematically through its form so well because Kurosawa manipulates each element of his toolkit with everything at his disposal he’s mastered so well. When they disappear it’s as though they’re visually physically stuck between this world and the next. When the girl confronts the barrier we don’t see because before the camera flips to reveal her pov and talks about going over to the other side when we are shown it’s the beach and that skeleton corpse shores up says it all. Also when she tries to buy a plane ticket to get out they ignore her because she can’t leave here.
My favorite sequence that tells me what Barren Illusion is essentially is when the girl plays with that slice of bread in bed then cut to she’s a jumper match cut to toast pop but wait the dust spores outside her window link to the following shot with the guy and the dust becoming this midpoint whole big part of the film. My point is on top of being purgatory Barren Illusion is experimental.
That’s why I’m so obsessed with Kiyoshi Kurosawa that elusive what every filmgoer filmmaker seeks. Doing something with the cinematic language we haven’t seen yet. Nor heard nor felt for that matter. Maybe I’m wrong but I like calling this one purgatory. Because why else when the girl goes jumper or she gets Rodney Kingged does she seemingly reset? Speaking of purgatory she’s a postal worker what other shorthand in our modern society is there for purgatory?
Is that a ten minute scene of them bouncing a ball back and forth or does it just feel that long? Also something I don’t think other slow cinema films do or have done yet that Barren Illusion does is it plays out as a silent film. Oh and yeah this is probably a throw away idea I’ll reconsider useless later but for now could the couple in this be ghosts? Because of the scene where the couple get a dog then later on there’s a quick scene with the dog catchers outside taking it to the pound and the guy standing there can’t do anything about it. Or maybe it’s just another purgatory thing. They feel like ghosts. Or as part of this loose disaffected youth trilogy the question returns to haunt us did I ever exist?
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