Cache-cache pastoral

In a dreamy setting of the Japanese countryside, a teenager subjected to the throes of his castrating mother finds his own path to emancipation through the discovery of his own sexuality. Terayama projects himself into the heart of a story based on the mother-son relationship and the hardships of growing up. Although the general tone of the film is much more poetical and surrealistic than that in Throw Away Your Books…, the obsession of the director's past and his youth traumas remain at the core of what is in truth a psychoanalytical self-study, going to far as to question the very approach taken by the auteur through an unexpected twist. In 1975 this film makes it out of the avant-garde cinema underground to the official Cannes competition programme.