Review of Woman in the Dunes (1964) by Alex S — 18 Jul 2007

They say the movies have a lot of sex and violence. Violence yes, sex not so much anymore. It was mostly exorcised from the movies some time after the great shark in Jaws ate a naked teenage girl and kids spent more money at pop-corn counters than their parents would have.

And considering how important the activity is in our lives and the relative likelihood in indulging in it or it least thinking about it when compared with violence it is odd that we see so little of it as a subject matter of the movies.

This film is about sex. That of course is a very simplistic description but not, in my view, entirely incompetent.

First the absurdly simple plot. A man ? an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) ? oversleeps when having a nap after a day?s insect-hunting in a remote desert of Japan. Local villagers tell him he?s too late for the last bus and too far from the next hotel but, not to worry, a local young widow (Kyoko Kishida) would put him up.

Grateful for the hospitality our entomologist (with a day-job of school-teacher and ?something of a scholar?) takes up the offer and looks forward to a home-made meal and the quaint, rustic experience of village life. He barely notices the oddness of the fact that his hostess lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand-pit reachable only by a rope ladder. The lack of electricity and running water are minor inconveniences for our intrepid thrill seeker for whom a rough night is little to complain about.

As he?s finishing his supper, his vaguely beautiful but simple hostess bows out and starts filling a crateful after another of sand that slowly but surely brushes off the soft cliff-sides that surround her house. She says she must do this every night or her house and the entire village (this latter geographical detail is never fully explained) will be buried by the sand within days. But he, her guest, does not need to do this ?on the first night?.

He almost ignores this off seemingly off-hand remark and goes to bed. The following morning he wakes up well ahead of his hostess. He can?t help noticing she sleeps in the buff. We later learn underwear would chafe the skin in this sandy environment. At first he politely waits for her to wake up but when he realises she?s understandably exhausted he leaves some money and sets to leave. But no rope ladder and no way out.

Slowly he realises his fate. He has effectively been kidnapped. In exchange for food and water ? and the occasional bottle of cheap sake ? he must help his new woman friend to shovel sand every night.

There is something fundamentally Sisyphusian about the job he?s made to do. The sand inexorably falls to the pit and there never seems to be any stability in the competition between man-made shovels and the falling sand.

The harrowing cinematography (Hiroshi Segawa) gives the sand that Neptunian character of the sea. It seems at times calm, at times angry. It is inviting and treacherous; beautiful and oppressive; silent and deafening. Toru Takemitsu?s avantguardist music screws in the maddeningly uneasy atmosphere. The perspectives, speeds, magnifying distances of the camera?s observations of the dunes lend the film the stifling atmosphere we need to empathise in the harsh charged of sexuality that emerges.

Because what do you do all day if you?re trapped with a wo/man waiting for the night to fall for night-shift to start? The unspoken complexities of power fucking, utilitarian exhibitionism, carnal empathy and the erotic intensity of proximity and mutual need are seen with the same playing with the knob (excuse the choice of words) of proximity and distance with which the camera studies the dunes when outside the couple?s house.

Skin ? its texture, its relief, its shades and its movement; the mood it imparts and the intensity it portrays ? acquires the same attention, the same atmospheric profoundness that the portrayals of sand that intersperse the love scenes enjoy.

The simplistic plot is obviously allegorical in an ever so slightly opaque way. ?Do you shuffle the sand to live or do you live to shuffle the sand?? That can be said of any job however occasionally satisfying it may be sometimes. The entomologist?s attempted escape seems to be a metaphor for our pathetic attempts to escape the realities we are stuck in. We spend days thinking of breaking out of the routines we live with but give little thought to what happens if we were to manage to leap over the barriers that surround us.

It is in the woman that he finds a point. That and in the space he creates for his own creativity and humanity even when trapped in this pit of sand. How a trap for crows is transformed by the end into an opportunity for hope is why the movies are a very specific medium for the telling of stories. Metamorphosis is essential to justify the process of art through moving pictures. And if that is so than the entomologist?s death to the world outside must precede the spread of his wings out of the crow?s trap he was lured in at the beginning of this picture.

Watch this.