We can't answer the confusion of "Who am I", "Where do I come from", "Where do I go", and we can't even grasp the present Dasein, because every second is history. People are like standing on a pile of sand, time flows away from the bottom of the foot like gravel, and you can't step on it. So, what are you living for?
Just like the woman who shovels sand day after day, is she shoveling sand to live, or she can live because of shoveling sand.
What is real. Are the contour lines of the title and the stamps of the staff's names real? When we turn our experience of space into an abstraction of space, and make mountains, rivers and rivers two-dimensional, and make flat contour maps, we humans are also abstracted into flat seals by ourselves. It was printed on paper with no sign of life. But these things without signs of life can represent life.
The film opens with a nihilistic tone. In scenes other than desert or desert, the protagonist walks without direction and purpose. Even the movement of the characters in the camera is chaotic and incoherent. He took pictures, he observed, he played with unknown bugs locked up in glass bottles, not knowing that the situation of those bugs was the fate that awaited him. In this isolated bottle, what past, what future, what identity, what freedom is nothingness that does not exist.
So, does the protagonist played by Okada Eiji still exist? This entomologist, he doesn't even have a name. However, the name is only the code name of the identity, and the loss of the name is just the loss of another abstract status symbol. Seven years later, his name and all paper documents will be included in the missing persons file, and will be sealed in a corner that will never see the sun. In the real society, he has disappeared from the world. Deep under the sand pit, being swallowed every day, the illusory thing of identity is far more real than the sand that can be touched by hand. And you see, this unnamed man, in this unnamed place, shoveled sand, got food, got cigarettes, got radios, and even women. What kind of life is a better life, a more meaningful life? In other words, which one is life.
The pursuit of freedom is also, in the face of survival, this illusory thing is a bit ridiculously extravagant. The woman with fine sweat and sand on her body didn't understand, she could only look at the man ignorantly. I don't understand his initial struggle, and I don't understand the madness that he finally had to have sex with her in public in order to take a look at the sea. Desperate and lonely. What's more, behind the infinite freedom is the infinite void itself. There is absolutely no absolute freedom in the world. In this case, what is the purpose of the painful struggle and hard pursuit?
In the end, he finally had a chance to get out of the barrenness that imprisoned his life, but he didn't, he gave up. Living the life of Sisyphus day after day, the sand is carried up, down, and up again. In the cycle, when the sandpit has become part of the purpose of a man's life, choosing to stay is not a confirmation of freedom in itself.
Every shot, every dialogue, every scene in the film is questioned.
However, discussing the meaning of life itself is a meaningless thing. And time, in the meaningless discussion, wasted some more.
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