Woman in the Dunes

You need to see WOMAN IN THE DUNES as soon as you can.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s masterpiece works in so many ways that it’s hard to determine where to begin.  You can see this movie as a really cool, extra-long episode of The Twilight Zone.  You can see this movie as a parable of the human experience.  You can see it as an anticapitalist illustration of the plight of the working man.  There’s so much here: the pressures of society, the sexual politics of courtship and marriage, the tension between our animal and intellectual selves, the brutal leveling of Japanese society.  And that’s just the first pass on the story.  The camerawork, the lighting, the music, the willingness to exaggerate points of view and ideas in light and sound, the achingly erotic and the terror of nightmare – it’s all here. 

Told in outline, the story seems to cry out for a Rod Serling introduction:  “Imagine, if you will, a man.  He carries a driver’s license, a library card, cash – the things he uses to reassure the world that he is who is.  He’s out for a walk in the dunes, followed by an afternoon nap.  But when he awakens, he’ll find himself … in The Twilight Zone.”  He learns that he’s missed the last bus.  A passing local offers to guide him to a home where someone will take him in for the night.  The home is in a deep pit in the sand, and he climbs down by rope ladder.  There’s a woman there, and she happily cooks him dinner and fans him while he eats.  Later that night, he awakens and sees her shoveling sand outside.  He goes back to sleep.  When he awakens that morning, he sees her again.  She’s sleeping on her tatami mat, her nude body dusted with sand and glittering in the morning light.

The rope ladder is gone. 

I’ve given you the teaser.  Now, I’m heading into spoiler territory.  If you’re intrigued but don’t want to know too much, now’s the time to click away and put this film at the top of your queue.

You’ve been warned.

Ok, back to it.  It’s too hard for a woman alone down at the bottom of that pit.  She can’t keep up with the shoveling and she needs a husband.  He’s it, and there’s no way out.  The villagers sell the sand and lower rations down to those who produce, so welcome to your life’s work.  At one point, he asks, “Do we shovel sand to live, or do we live to shovel sand?”  Well that’s just it, isn’t it?  If you aren’t fully invested in what you do, if your job is just a job, if you’re trapped, well, then what?  Are you doomed to labor so someone else can profit from your misery?  Does the whole point of your existence become the continuation of your existence?  And what if you buy into the trap?  What do you do if you get a chance to escape?  There’s a Japanese saying which roughly translates to, “The tallest nail gets the hammer.”  Do you put your head down and fit in?  Do you keep shoveling?  Do you have a choice?

This is the kind of movie you wish you could have seen in college, when you had all night to stay up and talk through its ramifications.  You know, however, that you couldn’t have gotten it, not really, while you were still in college.  You could have related to vision of the woman (or, later in the narrative, the man) with the light dusting of sand.  But the role of the individual in the family and the family in society, the web of responsibilities among all the players?  These are just ideas to you.  You need to live them for at least a decade or so for them to sink in.

I haven’t even gotten into the technical aspects of the film, the way it creates a living world in the sand, the way it photographs sand as a metaphor for responsibility or uses its dissonant music to jar the audience while reinforcing the narrative.  Here’s a film that understands points of view so clearly that it shows us not only what its characters are seeing, but what they’re focusing on and what they’re feeling and what they’re thinking about.  The camera isn’t just a clever audience surrogate here: the camera reflects and directs, it’s organic to the proceedings, a part of what’s going on.  You’ve heard of the God’s Eye View?  In this film, the camera sees what God sees.  Oh, and the lighting.  Wait until you see the light on the sand on the body – one of the most memorable images put to film.  Watch shadows play across faces and flashlight beams glare down brutal humanity in its cruelty and hope for redemption.  I would pay real money to see this movie broken down shot by shot.

So if you’re young, see WOMAN IN THE DUNES and marvel at the photography and the music and the construction and the story and the ideas.  If you’re older, see this film and marvel at the photography and the music and the construction and the story and the ideas and the truths and hopes and perceptions and vitality of the cycle of life.  See WOMAN IN THE DUNES and marvel.  See WOMAN IN THE DUNES and never be the same.