Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the Dunes, a Japanese film from 1964, is one of those films that has so many layers that its almost mentally exhausting. I can imagine people back puzzling over its meaning, and fifty years later I don't think that meaning is any clearer.

Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, and based on a novel by Kobo Abe, Woman in the Dunes is no less about the nature of existence and free will. It begins with a schoolteacher and amateur entomologist (played by Eiji Okada) wandering around some sand dunes, collecting insects. He misses the last bus, but local villagers offer to put him up for the night. He is sent to stay the night with a widow (Kyoka Kushida), who lives in a sand quarry. Okada climbs down a rope ladder, and enjoys her hospitality.

She tells him how the sand gets into everything, and how it killed her husband and daughter in an avalanche. By night she digs sand and sends it up a rope to the villagers, but it keeps sliding back down. She tells Okada this Sisyphean work is the only way to keep her house from being buried. He asks her why she stays, and she simply says that it is her home.

Okada awakens the next morning to find himself in a Serling-esque nightmare--the rope ladder is gone. It dawns on him that he has been lured there, and Kushida confirms it. The work is too much for a woman alone, so the villagers kidnap men and keep them in slavery. Okada, like anyone in a similar situation, is outraged and immediately plots how to escape, and tells her he will be missed and surely someone will come to his rescue.

That is the set-up, and the rest of the film follows just these two characters. Kushida is resigned to her fate, and laughs when Okada tells her about freedom. "It must be tiring to walk around aimlessly," she tells him. He is determined to outsmart his captors, but as time goes on he, too, becomes resigned. He does try to escape, and manages to get out of the quarry, but is caught in quicksand, and the villagers pull him out and take him back.

This film is fascinating on so many levels. The themes are constructed brilliantly. First, we have the insect collector, who pins his specimens on boards, becoming one of the collected himself. Then there is the relentlessly moving and shifting sand. The film was shot by Hiroshi Segawa, in what appears to be natural light. There are many interstitial shots of sand flowing like water (the opening shot is of a grain of sand). In the world of this film, sand is everything.

Woman in the Dunes telescopes outward to be a commentary on life itself. Okada asks Kushida, "Do you dig sand to live, or do you live to dig sand?" and doesn't get an answer. Late in the film he figures out a way to make a cistern, and this preoccupies his time. This well gives him hope, though it does not offer a way to escape. It as if it is an escape in his intellect.

Of course the two characters have something of a romance, as they are kept together and nature takes its course. There is a very brutal scene late in the film when Okada asks the villagers to be let out to see the sea. They agree, but only if he and Kushida put on a pornographic scene for them. She refuses, and Okada desperately and pathetically tries to rape her while the goggle-eyed villagers look on.

As stated, this film reminded me of certain Twilight Zone episodes, where characters are trapped in a nightmare scenario. It also vaguely reminded me of such stories as "The Lottery," in which a small society makes a bargain with evil to keep their way of life intact. In any event, this is a disturbing, brilliant film. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1964, and Teshigawara was nominated for Best Director the following year.