Hiroshi Teshigahara, adapting a novel by Kôbô Abe, has created a movie that portrays human existence with all the horror, irony and sensitivity that only a great artist can. It is so easy to reduce existence to a mere isolated concept, but few movies like Woman In The Dunes show the many angles from which our lives can and must be read.
Before becoming a parable about human existence, however, this movie begins simply with an amateur entomologist looking for insects in sand dunes. He's on a three-day vacation and left Tokyo for a bit of peace in the countryside. Furthermore, he hopes to one day find a unique species of insect and get his name on a field guide. Then a local villager convinces him to spend the night and takes him to a decrepit house inside a sand pit; the entomologist gets there through a rope ladder and enjoys the woman's hospitality, although he finds her strange for shoveling sand into buckets all night. In the next morning he's all ready to leave but the rope ladder is gone and he realizes that he's trapped and doomed to help the woman shovel sand into buckets forever, in return for rations.
There's a Greek myth, of King Sysiphus punished to carry a boulder up a slope only for it to fall down every time he was about to reach the top. It was a futile task but Sysiphus never stopped. Surely Kobo Abe got inspiration from this myth to create his story of a couple forever fighting sand dunes that continue to collapse and slide down, always threatening to devour their house and them too. The work is futile but must be done; and can't we say the same about life in general, which is fated to end sooner or later without us ever understand its purpose? Actors Eiji Okada and Kyôko Kishida (the woman in the pit) almost carry this movie alone on their shoulders. When one thinks about it, there isn't much about this movie except for two people talking and doing things. The entomologist is a person of action, decided not to give up and always planning escapes. The woman is resigned and toils because there's nothing else to do, she knows no other life.
Their relationship is strange and constantly in flux: there are moments of intimacy (this movie is extremely erotic and shows some of the most beautiful nudity in a movie I've ever seen), there's tension between them, there's violence and tears. One of my favorite scenes, and one of the most disturbing in this or in any other movies, is when the entomologist asks the villagers to let him climb up the pit once in a while to walk. The villagers agree but only if he has sex with the woman in front of them - he thinks for long seconds and then tries to rape her, much to the entertainment of the villagers, looking down as if it were a show. It's a difficult scene that both actors pull off and shows how low the entomologist is able to sink in his loss of humanity.
Finally I must speak about the sand. When we think of sand in cinema, we probably think of the deserts in Lawrence of Arabia. In that fine movie the sand is decoration, it's part of the location. But here it's a character in itself - it's alive, it slides, it kills, it's beautiful, it's unpredictable, it's omnipresent. The director spends a lot of time filming sand in all its behaviors. The characters never once forget it, they're always blowing it away or dusting it off their bodies.
Woman In The Dunes is one of those movies that one has the chance of discovering from time to time and leaves one in awe at its simplicity of plot but complexity of emotions. It's very much a perfect movie.
Before becoming a parable about human existence, however, this movie begins simply with an amateur entomologist looking for insects in sand dunes. He's on a three-day vacation and left Tokyo for a bit of peace in the countryside. Furthermore, he hopes to one day find a unique species of insect and get his name on a field guide. Then a local villager convinces him to spend the night and takes him to a decrepit house inside a sand pit; the entomologist gets there through a rope ladder and enjoys the woman's hospitality, although he finds her strange for shoveling sand into buckets all night. In the next morning he's all ready to leave but the rope ladder is gone and he realizes that he's trapped and doomed to help the woman shovel sand into buckets forever, in return for rations.
There's a Greek myth, of King Sysiphus punished to carry a boulder up a slope only for it to fall down every time he was about to reach the top. It was a futile task but Sysiphus never stopped. Surely Kobo Abe got inspiration from this myth to create his story of a couple forever fighting sand dunes that continue to collapse and slide down, always threatening to devour their house and them too. The work is futile but must be done; and can't we say the same about life in general, which is fated to end sooner or later without us ever understand its purpose? Actors Eiji Okada and Kyôko Kishida (the woman in the pit) almost carry this movie alone on their shoulders. When one thinks about it, there isn't much about this movie except for two people talking and doing things. The entomologist is a person of action, decided not to give up and always planning escapes. The woman is resigned and toils because there's nothing else to do, she knows no other life.
Their relationship is strange and constantly in flux: there are moments of intimacy (this movie is extremely erotic and shows some of the most beautiful nudity in a movie I've ever seen), there's tension between them, there's violence and tears. One of my favorite scenes, and one of the most disturbing in this or in any other movies, is when the entomologist asks the villagers to let him climb up the pit once in a while to walk. The villagers agree but only if he has sex with the woman in front of them - he thinks for long seconds and then tries to rape her, much to the entertainment of the villagers, looking down as if it were a show. It's a difficult scene that both actors pull off and shows how low the entomologist is able to sink in his loss of humanity.
Finally I must speak about the sand. When we think of sand in cinema, we probably think of the deserts in Lawrence of Arabia. In that fine movie the sand is decoration, it's part of the location. But here it's a character in itself - it's alive, it slides, it kills, it's beautiful, it's unpredictable, it's omnipresent. The director spends a lot of time filming sand in all its behaviors. The characters never once forget it, they're always blowing it away or dusting it off their bodies.
Woman In The Dunes is one of those movies that one has the chance of discovering from time to time and leaves one in awe at its simplicity of plot but complexity of emotions. It's very much a perfect movie.