Woman in the Dunes
d. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964
I still may be too overwhelmed by Hiroshi Teshigahara's masterpiece Women in the Dunes to write something useful, but I still feel strangely compelled to write something about it. Needless to say, however, nothing I can write will do justice to this profound cautionary tale about man's place in the world. It is essential viewing for anyone halfway interested in the world.
The film revolves around an entomologist going to the desert in search of rare insects. He takes a nap after a long day of digging around, and when he wakes up one of the locals tells him that he has missed the last bus. The man takes him to a large hole where a woman lives. She is very welcoming and appears to be under the impression that he will be staying for a long. He, on the other hand, clarifies that he is merely there overnight and that he has obligations back home.
The woman's job is to rake sand at night and send it up to the people who live up in the village, one of which is the man that took the entomologist to the hole. The first night there, the woman explains her living conditions, including the fact that sand constantly falls and covers everything, sometimes even one or two feet deep. The next morning, he wakes up and finds that the rope ladder he used to get down there is gone. He waits until the woman wakes up but comes to the conclusion that she couldn't had done it alone (the rope ladder had to be untied from the top); instead, it was planned by everyone as a way to keep him there.
From that point on, Women in the Dunes becomes the story of their relationship. The entomologist spends most of his time either trying to convince her to let him out (though I think he himself knows she doesn't have much control over the situation), or trying to escape through other means. He hopes that the people back in Tokyo will send for a search team; but after three months pass, he loses hope. The one time he manages to escape, through the use of a rope with scissors attached to the end as a hook, he sinks in quicksand and the men from the town save him, forcing him to go back.
The man constantly brings up the fact that life for the woman is meaningless in the pit ("Are you living to shovel, or shoveling to live?" he says), though she appears to accept her fate and be content with her situation. He talks about his life back in Tokyo and about how one of the bugs that he could find in the desert could be named after him, thus making him famous. Not until the very end of the film does the entomologist discover that the meaning of life lies not in the formalities of the modern world, but in being content and finding satisfaction in what one does.
About some technical aspects of the film, Woman in the Dune's haunting score by Toru Takemitsu is an integral part of the effect, especially during the intervals showing the effects of sand; the music reminded me of what Ingmar Bergman used at the beginning of Persona, released two years after this film. The beautiful black-and-white photgraphy by Hiroshi Segawa along with Teshigahara's compositions create a very distinct and reflective mood that matches perfectly with the film's thematic groundwork.
Towards the end of Woman in the Dune, the woman gets sick (from what is implied to be a miscarriage) and must be taken into town. The men who take her leave the rope ladder down and the entomologist is left standing there. He climbs it, looks around the desert. And the camera then moves to something he created a while ago: a way to extract water from the sand. In voiceover, he says that he wishes to show it to the people of the town. Then, a missing sign is superimposed saying that he's been missing for seven years.
The ending is suggesting that the man has found a way to live his life in the dune in accordance to something he finds valuable. He found a way to survive and though it may seem like small consolation, it certainly is better than none. The last sequence calls to mind such exisential novels as Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea and Albert Camus' The Stranger. In Nausea, Sartre ends with the protagonist coming to the conclusion that he doesn't have to write the book he's been working on (a biography of Marquis de Sade), but still finds hope for the his individual freedom and happiness in a seemingly meaningless world. Woman in the Dunes ponders on whether a man's worldly achievements validate his existence.
P.S. 1964 may very well be one of the greatest years in film history. Godard's Band of Outsiders, Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Lester's A Hard Day's Night, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and now Woman in the Dunes. Wow, what a year. (Next friday I'm watching Dreyer's Gertrud, also from 1964).
