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Woeful of the trappings of civilization, a young entomologist enjoys solitary fieldwork among the dunes of an oceanside village. Missing his bus to Tokyo, he accepts an invitation to stay in the home of a young widow, whose hut lies at the bottom of an ominous sand pit. He soon realizes that he has been trapped, and that his new role as surrogate husband--helping with the Sisyphean task of shoveling the daily torrent of windblown sand--has been forced on him by a mysterious conspiracy of villagers, who supply provisions from above via rope and pulley. As time passes, the man's initial fury gives way to gradual acceptance, until life in the sand pit seems preferable to attempted escape.
Hiroshi Teshigahara was a 37-year-old novice when he made this film, which received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film. Intimately observing the emotional arc of his characters, Teshigahara incorporates sex, desperation, ingenuity, suffering, pleasure, and much more into this hypnotic visual experience (accompanied by Toru Takemitsu's masterful score), in which sand becomes the third and most dominant character. With images and sequences that are hauntingly and unforgettably evocative, Woman in the Dunes remains a truly extraordinary work of cinematic art. --Jeff Shannon
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The plot of this movie has been fairly well summarized by several reviewers. For completeness, I give a thumbnail sketch: A youngish man for the city (Tokyo) goes to a desolate part of the countryside to collect insects (his hobby). He overstays, and misses the last bus back. The local villagers decide to put him up with "Granny" - who turns out to be thirtyish, not-unattractive woman, who ominously lives at the bottom of a sand pit. The next morning the man finds the ladder removed, and himself trapped in the sand pit. Much of the movie portrays his half-hearted attempts to escape, and his tempestuous relationship with his woman "jailor." Near the end of the movie he is given a clear and easy chance to escape, but decides to "postpone" his departure.
This film is an adaptation of the novel by the same name by the Japanese writer, Kobo Abe. A major and fascinating writer, Abe shares stylistic affinities with Dostoyevsky and (especially) Camus. Alienation and loss of identity are prominent Abe motifs (as they are with Camus). The movie was made in Japan; so unlike many Hollywood films, it is fairly faithful to the novel. For stylistic reasons, it was made in black and white: shadows are an essential element in the mood.
An extreme reductionist view of the film/novel might go something like this: The movie explores the eternal dance by which man and woman accommodate themselves to each other. The woman's need for security, stability, and social respectability often conflict with the man's need for freedom, new experiences, and impractical dreams. Gradually, through a largely unconscious process, the two make those small adjustments which allow for a log-term - if somewhat uneasy - alliance.
A secondary theme is the corrosive effects of time. Or more accurately, the effects of the second law of thermodynamics/entropy: things not constantly repaired, whether house or relationship, inevitably deteriorate. Time/entropy is represented in the film by the unceasing flow of sand. Light and shadows - prominent throughout the film - symbolize the dualities of life.
It is easy to make a case that the movie has a misogynistic tone. Certainly the image of woman as an ant-lion lurking at the bottom a sand pit is not the most flattering. But upon further analysis this view must be rejected. The reason the protagonist does not return to his former life (once given the chance) is simply that his former life lacked emotional meaning. The struggle with the woman at the bottom of the sand pit, although grim in certain respects, reconnects him with those parts of himself which his overly civilized and sterile city life had disconnected.
The first film of the set, 1962's "Pitfall" (****), represents Teshigahara's debut as a feature filmmaker and is both an expressionistic ghost story and a scathing social critique of Japan's post-WWII labor conditions within the mining industry. The mystery-laden plot focuses on a poor coal miner, who is murdered in front of his young son after moving to a ghost town where the local mine becomes a battleground between the two unions that run it. The miner's ghost attempts to solve the crime and figure out the motive, all the while as mistrust permeates the community with more deaths occurring. The filmmaker's social agenda sometimes gets in the way of a corking detective story, but he also presents a haunting, often surreal allegory of social alienation and moral bankruptcy. Hisashi Igawa lends a palpable desperation to the doomed miner, while Kunie Tanaka cuts an appropriately austere figure as the unavoidable stranger in the white suit.
An international art house hit that even garnered Oscar nominations, 1964's "Woman in the Dunes" (*****) is the set's centerpiece and a deserving masterpiece. The highly symbolic story focuses on an amateur entomologist on what he thinks is a day trip from Tokyo to a seaside area with vast sand dunes. As he looks for a particular beetle that he thinks will bring him fame within scientific circles, he loses track of time, and local villagers come upon him. For overnight lodging, they take him to a woman who lives in the bottom of a sand pit reachable only by a rope ladder. With the ladder gone the next morning, it dawns on him that he is being held captive by the villagers. From this revelation, Teshigahara and Abe focus on how the man deals with the situation and his evolving feelings toward the woman. Eiji Okada (Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Ugly American) dominates every scene as the emotionally volatile entomologist evolving from sexist entitlement to humiliating desperation to serene resignation. As the woman, the offbeat-looking Kyôko Kishida initially seems to be playing Friday to Okada's Robinson Crusoe, but her character starts to reveal layers that startle and fill in necessary plot details. The film's overall unnerving tone makes it feel often like an extended episode of a Twilight Zone.
The third film presented is 1967's "The Face of Another" (***1/2), which provides some unsettling sci-fi elements in its piercing exploration of identity, personal freedom and social acceptance. It's probably the most audacious of the three films, but Teshigahara's overly stylized approach makes it arguably the least satisfying on an emotional level. That's because the primary characters feel somewhat removed from reality starting with an embittered burn victim named Okuyama, his face completely bandaged. He has an oddly co-dependent relationship with his psychiatrist, who gives him a prosthetic mask that allows him to start his life anew. However, Okuyama's emotionally isolated wife returns into his life, and the inevitable complications occur. Meanwhile, there is a parallel story centered on a young woman who bears a large radiation burn on her face, a victim of the atomic bomb dropped in Nagasaki. Her wish is to conform wither surroundings and be accepted, which makes for an intriguing counterpoint to Okuyama's plight. Tatsuya Nakadai (Harakiri, Ran, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) plays the challenging role of Okuyama with effective menace and melancholy, and as his wife, the legendary Machiko Kyô (Rashomon, Ugetsu, Floating Weeds) lends an elegant but tangible sense of concealment to her relatively few scenes.
Each film benefits greatly from Tôru Takemitsu's mood-setting music impressive for the versatility he displays with each score. Although extras are modest, each DVD has the original trailer and a generally illuminating if sometimes overly verbose video essay by James Quandt, who heads the Ontario Cinematheque. The fourth disc contains "Teshigahara and Abe", an intriguing documentary that covers the filmmaker's eclectic life, including his years being groomed to take over his father's world-renowned ikebana (flower arrangement) school. The four relatively modest shorts provide variable interest to aficionados - 1953's "Hokusai" spotlights the famous block artist; 1956's "Ikebana", a color film which shows the hard-earned artistry found in his father's school; 1958's "Tokyo 1958", an odd curio designed to show the vibrancy of the city at the time; and 1965's "Ako", a simple short about a girl's night on the town. Finally, there is a fifty-page booklet that provides further insight into a filmmaker more than worthy of rediscovery.
The cinematographer was Hiroshi Segawa, and he played with light and shadow like a painter, finding a perfectly balanced blend between Abe's prose and Teshigahara's vision. He helped Sand become the third major character in the film, giving it personality, creating a Dali-esque canvas. He photographed sand as if it were a breathing beast, with wind rippling over the white dunes spreading the sand like waves of water, flapping the edges like it was moving silk. And he utilized a lot of extreme close-ups of skin pores choked with grains of sand, and sweaty strands of hair with sand granules clinging to them.
Toru Takemitsu did the music. The score was minimalist, yet powerful and staccato, piercing through us with flute, drum, and strings. The music only materialized when it was needed and necessary. Most of the film was not underscored with music. We heard breathing, moaning, rolling waves, shoveling, the crackling of fire, the bubbling of water, soap on skin, and the terrible creaking of old wood as that house swayed beneath the steady onslaught of the sand.
An essay written by Albert Camlus on the Myth of Sisyphus influenced the plot; that if a person is forced to exercise their entire being toward nothing, accomplishing nothing, mired in repetition, the human spirit is still not vanquishable. It will find joy in the task. Camus wrote,"happiness and the absurd are twin sons of the same earth; inseparable." Sisyphus achieved an emotional victory after he learned to love the rock he was pushing repeatedly up the mountainside. Our protagonists achieved a kind of emotional victory when their labor became sacred and necessary.
Eiji Okada played Niki Jumpei, a stranger wandering the dunes searching for insects; especially one rare beetle. Missing the last bus back to Tokyo, he approached some villagers and requested local accommodations. They agreed, and let him stay the night in a house at the bottom of one of their great sand pits. This was a village that the sand had attempted to devour, comprised of a honeycomb of pits dotted across the shoreline, mostly devoured by the shifting sands; only the occasional rooftop protruding out of the darkness of the many pits.
His hostess, played by Kyoko Kishida, was a thirty-something woman, widowed by the sand, and determined to stay the course, to remain in her domicle. She had to shovel the windblown sand constantly to deny the elements the chance to bury her alive. The following morning the man finds that the rope ladder he descended on was missing. He was trapped. Obviously the villagers were in on the conspiracy. Trapped there he lost his freedom, but in its place he found purpose, and with purpose he found meaning, and with meaning he found a strange joy; something he had never known.
This is a stunning film, perfectly in balance; blending poetry, literature, calligraphy, cinematography, and music. It is what all good movies aspire to be-- it is art. It a true classic, almost without flaw. I saw this film three decades ago, and as a twenty-something youth, during my University days, I was not fully appreciative of the subtleties within the piece. It is a timeless parable of the human condition, a film that begs for more than one viewing. The photography haunted me, and the eroticism, and the existential terror stayed with me. It made me hunger to read the novel.
First the psychological..... Read more
Criterion has done here another astonishing compilation of Teshigahara's films. Read more
