WOMAN IN THE DUNES
RELEASED: I964

Woman in the Dunes is not necessarily about entropy, but one can hardly help but think of it. The wind blows and the dunes are constantly falling and eroding, the sand covering everything. The surreal and at times, absurd nature of Woman in the Dunes has been compared to existentialist works such as Sartre's No Exit. It's also a perfect metaphor for marriage, if viewed from a rather jaundiced male perspective.

The screenplay is by Kobo Abe, based on his own novel; an amateur entomologist-schoolteacher on vacation goes to an isolated seaside location of sand dunes in order to collect and identify rare insects. He falls asleep in an old boat and when he awakes he's missed his bus home. Some locals put him up at the house of local widow woman in the dunes. The house is located in a pit because the sand has risen all around it. Each day the woman digs sand from around the house so it won't be buried. When our vacationer arrives at the house, she's unusually glad to see him. The idea that she is collecting him much as he collects bugs doesn't occur to him until it's too late, when he discovers that the rope ladder to the pit is gone and he can't get out.

Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada) is expected to remain in the pit and join the woman in shoveling sand, which is hauled to the surface in bags by nearby villagers. He goes through all the stages of any human faced with an unalterable situation - anger, bargaining, and grief - as the world closes in on him and he realizes there's no way out. The possible metaphors for his situation are endless, and we can feel for his plight; each of us is caught more or less in a similar situation. The fashion of the day was existentialism; there are echoes of that, as well as Zen Bhuddist thought, and an ineffable Japanese-ness that can only be experienced by a Westerner but never be fully understood.

All the while the wind keeps blowing and the sand keeps moving and falling into the pit. At one point, Niki escapes, but he gets lost in the dunes and falls in quicksand, only to be returned to the pit by the villagers. He's curiously indifferent to the very beautiful woman he shares his little patch of sand with; she never seems like more than a symbolic presence in his situation. Perhaps the situation is like our relationship to DNA, are we it's master, or it's slave - doing it's bidding.

Woman in the Dunes has a Japanese esthetic; a stripped-down, beautifully spare feeling that photographs well in black and white. The two people share the primitive life with only one oil-lamp and no electricity or other conveniences. The film becomes an exercise in life's limits and what's really important. If you don't know Japanese culture, this might be an entry-point. The photography is an order of magnitude beyond most western films.



A Review and Synopsis of "Woman in the Dunes"