Woman in the Dunes (1964)

If, a few years ago, someone told me I would be absolutely mesmerized by a movie set entirely inside a sandpit and revolving around only two characters, I would have laughed at their faces. Also, if I were also told I would prefer the director's cut, 147-minutes long version of that movie, in which the story is unfolded ever more slowly, I would have said they were drunk. Yet, here I am with nothing but good things to write about Woman in the Dunes.

The story revolves around a man (Okada Eiji), who ended up stranded in the desert while looking for a rare variant of tiger beetle. Convinced by the local villagers to spend the night in the hut of a woman (Kishida Kyōko), located at the bottom of a sandpit, upon waking up he finds himself unable to leave: he has been trapped into helping the woman fill buckets of sand to prevent her house from being buried by the dunes. "If I fall behind, my house will be buried. Then the house nextdoor would be the next. [...] [The villagers] calculated it's much cheaper this way", she explains. Days go by with the man being naturally hostile toward the woman at first, then accepting his new fate as a sand shoveler, as they both depend on their weekly rations, provided by the villagers as payment for their work, in order to survive. Months fly by. While trying to devise a way to escape, the man discovers how to extract water from the dunes, making this his new pastime. When finally given an opportunity to escape, with the woman being taken to the doctor due to her troubled pregnancy, he chooses not to. "There's no need to rush away just yet. [...] I'm bursting with the desire to tell someone about the pump, and who better to tell than these villagers? [...] I can think about escaping the day after that", says he.

The Man (Okada Eiji) and the Woman (Kishida Kyōko)

For 90% of screen time, there are only two characters in the movie, the man and the woman, and none of them is ever referred to by name: he calls her "Madam" (奥さん), while she addresses him by "Guest" (客さん). This artifice, used first (to my knowledge) in F.W. Murnau's magnificent Sunrise (1928) and more recently in Lars von Trier's haunting Antichrist (2009), is normally employed toward turning the target characters into archetypes, to try and make them resonate with a larger audience, with the script normally focusing on universally recognizable emotions. In here, though, both characters are distinctively Japanese: he is an amateur entomologist (fact well established during the first half-hour of movie time), a common pastime among Japanese boys and men; she is a typical soft-voiced Japanese wife, always abiding by her husbands wishes (even if it means dying of thirst). In here, names are not mentioned because they are unnecessary: the man and the woman live in their own microcosm at the bottom of the sandpit, with next to no interaction with the outside world. Such artifice is thus used in this case to emphasize such isolation.

The Man and the Woman talking about the outside world

Okada Eiji plays the man, whose name we later discover to be Jumpei Niki, a loner who prefers the solitude of the desert to his life in Tokyo. "Men and women are slaves to their fear of being cheated. In turn, they dream up new certificates to prove their innocence. No one can say where it will end", he mocks. Ironically, after being trapped in the sandpit, he uses the same certificates he once despised as proof he is a respected man in Tokyo, and therefore it should't take long for someone to come looking for him... Also, by having come from the a world much bigger than the woman's, he simply cannot understand why she does not rebel against the villagers, or why she does not seem eager to leave the sandpit to walk around. "Even dogs go crazy chained up all day, and we're human beings!", he shouts at her, in a beautiful scene in which he tries to understand her. Actually, he himself is a puzzle, as made evident by his actions at the end of the movie, but more on that later.

The Woman (Kishida Kyōko)

The heart of the film is indeed the woman, played masterfully by Kishida Kyōko.We don't know much about her, just enough to feel that, while the man is her hostage, she is a hostage of herself. She seems to have fully embraced that lifestyle, and one might even say she's happy with it. Did she always live at the bottom of the sandpit, or did she went to live there after her family died, in the previous year, simply because she didn't have any other choice? The villagers, clearly burakumin, are happy to treat her as society has treated them, harshly and mockingly, as exemplified in a scene in which they require the man to rape her in front of them in order to allow the man to go and observe the sea for a few minutes. Even so, she never fights back. Is it because she doesn't know any better? She is also terribly afraid of being alone, as she would not be able to gather enough sand to earn her weekly rations and would surely die. "This life is too hard for a woman alone", she says. Besides, by being a human being who has spent the previous year alone, she is also desperate for human contact; therefore, it is no surprise that she grows to love her new companion. As a consequence, she has even more reasons to fear her being left alone, and she knows the man is always scheming ways of escaping... 

And then there's the puzzling ending, which begs the question: is this a movie about damnation or deliverance? When the man gives up the opportunity of escaping, does he do so because he is now a broken man, as Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (the book, not the movie), whose free will has been crushed? Or does he make that choice for having finally found with the woman, at the bottom of a sandpit, that which he had never had when free? After all, his parting with the woman was truly heartbreaking: even suffering from agonizing pain due to her troubled pregnancy, she did not want to leave, for she was sure that the man would not be there when she returned. Despite barely being able to speak because of the pain, she kept mumbling "no" in tears, always staring at him, while being hoisted up by the villagers to be taken to the doctor. How can you not be moved by that???

A moth trapped by the man, who considers it a lesser being

When talking about Woman in the Dunes, one is compelled to mention director Teshigahara Hiroshi, editor Shuzui Fusako and cinematographer Segawa Hiroshi's portrait of the third main character in the movie, the sand itself. When we see the dunes blowing in the wind, the lack of a reference point makes it impossible for us to judge the scale of the scene, which has the desired effect of being quite disorienting. Also, when filming the couple inside the hut, they make sure we we always see sand either trickling in or deposited onto something, thus assuring we are always aware of the situation the man and the woman are in. The shots of the moth trying to crawl its way out of a slippery glass jar, thus mirroring the man and the dunes, are also a nice touch to remind us that the man too is keeping as a hostage something he judges to be a lesser being.

Also worthy of notice is Takemitsu Tōru's piercing soundtrack, which reminded me a lot of that of Kwaidan (1964, which Ebert once described as "an assembly of ghost stories that is among the most beautiful films I've seen"). Its strident tunes are sparingly used, only punctuating important parts of the movie, whose soundtrack is, for the main part, made of diegetic sounds. It has the unique effect of making scenes feel odd and unsettling, effective specially in the scenes in which the man and the woman have sex: for them, it's not a romantic act, but a lustful, nearly animal like activity, and the soundtrack elevates that to a nearly unbearably high level.

Summarizing it:

Liked	Didn't like
Kishida Kyōko makes the whole movie work	Can't think of anything
Kudos for the crew for being able to produce a masterpiece out of a story rooted on two people inside a sandpit

The saddest line in the movie:

---

Great Movie review by Roger Ebert here.

If you liked this movie, then maybe try watching Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953).

---