Woman in the Dunes
by Hiroshi Teshigahara
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Eiji Okada, Hiroko Ito, Koji Mitsui, Ky?ko Kishida, Sen YanoDirector: Hiroshi Teshigahara
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: Japanese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: Pan & Scan, 1.33:1
Running Time: 127 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-01-04
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Woman in the Dunes
Movie Review: A classic, I suppose
Summary: 3 Stars
I watched Woman In The Dunes recently for the reason, I suppose, most nowadays would watch Woman In The Dunes - I was told I'm supposed to. As someone who loves an old, influential movie, I never pass up a chance to see where cinematic tropes began and what modern work has been influenced by a great old movie - if not, simply, to see a great old movie. Woman In The Dunes, Hiroshi Teshigahara's most famous movie, is visually arresting - its endless fields of sand are the stuff of intense textural specificity, and the shots that are framed around the curves of bodies, naked or clothed, follow that same specificity and exploit for erotic power. I do think, though, that the movie gets impossible to watch in one sitting - a movie that is supposed to make you feel empathy for a person trapped in an endless situation should not, too, make you feel trapped in an endless situation, and Woman In The Dunes does. In an extraordinary essay on the film, Roger Ebert describes it as "a modern version of the myth of Sisyphus," and the points he raised are truly twice as fascinating as the movie (read it sometime in his Great Movies section). Yet it strikes me that movies of similar philosophical ilk do not have to be this deadening - a movie like, say, Roman Polanski's Repulsion used its glacial pace to unnerve you, to deprive you of your ability to tell one second apart from an hour, and it uses that deprivation to address victorian fears of sexuality and changing morals. Each narrative Herzog movie speaks to his larger theme of man shown as quixotic in the face of the nature man claims dominion over, and slow as his movies are, they allow you to engage in the same sense of unnerved dislocation as their central characters. I don't think Woman In The Dunes does that - it creates a true sense of place, and certainly makes you feel stuck there, but does not connect to any sense of philosophical speculation - it makes you, truly, hope for an ending. I'm glad this movie exists, and I'm glad the rerelease features Teshigahari's earlier short works, and I'm truthfully glad I saw it. But I will never never watch it again, and would be shocked to hear someone who felt excited about this movie.
Summary of Woman in the Dunes
Hiroshi Teshigahara's powerful masterpiece follows an amateur biologist who escapes the bustle of the city by studying beetles in remote sand dunes. After missing the last bus, he accepts a villager's offer to spend the night in a widow's shack at the bottom of a deep sand pit. In the morning he finds he is trapped. At first enraged, the man's hatred for the woman soon turns to searing, erotic lust. In Japanese with English subtitles.In addition to being a celebrated milestone of Japanese cinema, Woman in the Dunes is surely one of the most sensual films ever made--not in the purely erotic sense (although eroticism is certainly a potent element), but as a work of pure cinema, in which cinematography and nature combine as powerful forces of artistic expression, melded with a timeless parable of the human condition. Dialogue is sparse and precise, submitting to dreamlike atmosphere and imagery that is genuinely universal; this is the cinematic equivalent of a prehistoric cave drawing, telling a story for all humankind.
Woeful of the trappings of civilization, a young entomologist enjoys solitary fieldwork among the dunes of an oceanside village. Missing his bus to Tokyo, he accepts an invitation to stay in the home of a young widow, whose hut lies at the bottom of an ominous sand pit. He soon realizes that he has been trapped, and that his new role as surrogate husband--helping with the Sisyphean task of shoveling the daily torrent of windblown sand--has been forced on him by a mysterious conspiracy of villagers, who supply provisions from above via rope and pulley. As time passes, the man's initial fury gives way to gradual acceptance, until life in the sand pit seems preferable to attempted escape.
Hiroshi Teshigahara was a 37-year-old novice when he made this film, which received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film. Intimately observing the emotional arc of his characters, Teshigahara incorporates sex, desperation, ingenuity, suffering, pleasure, and much more into this hypnotic visual experience (accompanied by Toru Takemitsu's masterful score), in which sand becomes the third and most dominant character. With images and sequences that are hauntingly and unforgettably evocative, Woman in the Dunes remains a truly extraordinary work of cinematic art. --Jeff Shannon
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