Woman in the Dunes (1964) - #394

Who's got the right to force me into such a rotten deal?

If the film were made today, the set-up of Woman in the Dunes would have the average movie-goer of 2013 thinking that we're in for an excursion into either horror or something sexually explicit: a man and a woman, trapped together in a shack, surrounded by sadistic voyeurs who egg them on for their sick amusement, try to resist but eventually succumb to the pressure. The social order breaks down, mental disciplines and customs of habit recede, raw carnality soon takes over.

Actually, judging from that poster on the left, audiences of the mid-1960s couldn't be faulted for expecting a milder version of the titillating possibilities that I mentioned above (which was, after all, probably even more provocative and shocking in that repressed cultural milieu that what someone like Lars von Trier would distill from such a premise in our jadedly explicit era.) To summarize a bit more precisely: a wandering scientist (nameless until the final scene), exploring a desert looking for uncommon and undiscovered insects, winds up a specimen himself after he's tricked by local peasants who lure him into a trap. A strange rustic cabin, located deep at the bottom of a steep sand cliff, is occupied by a lone woman whose seemingly futile assignment is to shovel buckets full of sand each night. She applies herself to this menial task in order to avoid being buried by the countless grains that trickle incessantly down upon her rude homestead. The bug collector, who initially agrees to join her partly due to need (he missed the last bus back to town) and partly out of respect to local hospitality, soon discovers that the woman and his captors have no intention of letting him go. That presents a problem - he's on a few days leave from his job, with a life of some sort (professional associates for sure, perhaps a wife and family, though his domestic status remains enigmatic throughout) that he has no desire or rational reason to abandon. He's confident that his steps will be traced, that people from the city will soon come looking for him. And besides, what would be the purpose of prolonging his stay with the Woman in the Dunes for more than a day or two, after the prank has run its course, after their cruel curiosity about his response to the dilemma had been satisfied?

As it turns out, there is no clearly defined purpose to his captivity, nor are we forced to endure the bitterness of a Shyamalan-esque twist at the end that provides an all-too-tidy explanation of his circumstances. That's all for the good, as Woman in the Dunes functions best when it's left uninterpreted, allowed to infiltrate our conscious and subconscious awareness from a variety of angles that its creators prove to be quite skilled at approaching.

This is another one of those films that cause me some degree of consternation when it comes time to write it up. The technical craftsmanship that went into its construction offers a lot to admire. The existential questions it poses stir up my thoughts in ways that fluctuate pleasantly between self-conscious profundity at how the plight we see on screen illuminates various aspects of our own cultural confinement and the ultimate absurdity of all human striving, and simple amusement at the filmmakers' unpredictable blend of precocious intelligence and creative audacity. But the attempts I've made, either mentally or in a few early (and discarded) drafts for this blog haven't really satisfied me. Maybe I've read too many other reviews of this film that attempt to provide a schematic interpretation of what Woman in the Dunes is supposedly "about." Some of them make points that I would myself, if I found myself compelled to write an analytical college essay or something along those lines. (Believe me, there's ample material for such explication here.) One I saw on IMDb draws justifiable parallels to Patrick McGoohan's 1967 TV series The Prisoner, which I coincidentally just happen to be watching again lately (he also throws in a gratuitous reference to Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which I seriously doubt registered at all on director Hiroshi Teshigahara's radar as he was planning this film.) Some of the reviews actually repel me, not at all because they're poorly written, but to me at least, they're simply too definitive - they narrow the focus too much for my taste, and I don't get any enjoyment from reading them. I hardly want to create that same impression here. I'd rather just commend the film for your own exploration, let it speak to you on its own terms, without my mediation. Maybe it's better suited for examination by podcast with a group of friends than for yet another movie blogger working solo.

Be that as it may, here's a pixely, nearly wordless and unsubtitled trailer for the film, a dim indicator of the visual and aural splendors that the Criterion DVD offers (though it sure would be nice to see that sand flowing in crystalline hi-def blu-ray some day), followed by the one early draft that I held onto, looking at Woman in the Dunes more from the perspective of the big splash it made upon its initial release.

Going by the tri-lingual opening credits (in Japanese, French and English) that we see festooned over the hypnotic, concentric etchings that usher us in to our eventual meeting with the Woman in the Dunes, it's apparent that the films creators had a sophisticated international audience in mind. By way of comparison with the relatively heavyweight intellectualism proffered by its celebrated and then-fashionable art house predecessors (Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, Antonioni's L'eclisse, Bergman's The Silence, Godard's Contempt) and in competition with his contemporaneous peers in Japan (Imamura's The Insect Woman, Kurosawa's High and Low, even boundary-pushing lowbrow exploitation flicks like Suzuki's Gate of Flesh and Youth of the Beast), there can be little doubt that Hiroshi Teshigahara and his collaborative partners, the novelist Kobo Abe and avant garde musician Toru Takemitsu intended Woman in the Dunes to be a major cinematic event. They certainly succeeded in fulfilling that ambition: impeccable artistic sensibilities across multiple disciplines coupled with the allure of a pulsating undercurrent of eroticism that finally bursts forth midway through the film (without ever venturing into the realm of pornography) stirred up interest in the film as a "must see" among the in-crowd. Academy Award nominations in two consecutive years (1965 for Best Foreign Film and in 1966 for Best Director) are the film's most noteworthy tokens of success, along with significant recognition from Cannes and back home in Japan, where it fairly swept up all the awards for which it was nominated. That's in spite of the undeniably weird and primordially mythic attributes of its story and the strident confrontational tone of the aesthetic scheme that the film's masterminds rigorously adhered to throughout the creative process. Plus it's really long - 2 1/2 hours, which made Woman in the Dunes a major statement back then. It remains quite formidable today, an imposing, potentially hostile expanse of cinema that despite its arid setting proves surprisingly full of life and vitality, once we brush the sand out of our eyes and spit out the gritty residue that we're fairly compelled to inhale in the course of our journey.

Next: Fight, Zatoichi, Fight