Woman in the Dunes has been described as an existential fairy-tale, but beyond that it is simply a good story, well told. Made by acclaimed Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara, this classic of Japanese New Wave cinema touches on identity, society, and finding meaning in a meaningless world.
Plot
The movie begins with sand. Millions and millions of grains of sand. After the sand, there are bugs. After the bugs, Schoolteacher and amateur entomologist Niki Jumpei. He travels around the desert, on vacation from his busy life in the city. After he misses the last bus home though, he has to find somewhere to stay the night. An old man leads him to the house of a local widow who lives at the bottom of a huge pit of sand.
The woman is at first a gracious and charming host. The next morning, however, Jumpei walks outside to discover the rope ladder that lowered him into the pit is gone. Though the woman dodges most of his direct questions, it soon becomes obvious that he will not be able to leave any time soon.
From there out, the story concerns Jumpei’s attempts to leave in spite of the entrapping sand, cruel villagers and a growing affection for the woman.
Location
The dunes in this movie are entirely a product of Teshigahara’s imagination: no such location exists in Japan. The sand becomes a symbol of nature- but not a fruitful one. The sand is barren and useless for everything except the production of discount concrete.
Despite its deadness, Jumpei is able to discover a use for the sand. He constructs a device that, through capillary action, sucks moisture out of the sand into barrels. This discovery could solve some of the village’s misery and is the principle accomplishment of the main character in the course of the movie.
Theme
His ability to draw life-giving water from sterile sand introduces one of the major themes of this movie: humans as meaning-makers. This theme crops up a number of times throughout the film in a variety of contexts.
The idea of significant contribution to a society is highly esteemed in this movie, while the idea of the cultivation of individual identity is degraded. Jumpei feels a meaningfulness when he has learned how to help these villagers that he was unable to feel in the documents-and-bureaucracy civil servant life in Tokyo. Moreover, his entomology, a staple of his identity in the early part of the film, is all but abandoned half way through when he has issues of survival at hand.
However, the movie doesn’t simply decry city life and esteem village life. While the misplaced bureaucracy of Tokyo is framed as aimless, the rituals of the village are barbaric.
In one of the most unsettling scenes in the film, Jumpei is promised additional water if he will bring the woman out and make love to her in front of the village. The villagers all wear masks and play drums on the edge of the dune, looking down at the couple fighting over whether or not they will do it.
The social dilemma Teshigahara paints here is a difficult one: a choice between crude cruelty and refined emptiness. A solution is presented in Jumpei’s discovery. He does the best he can, contributes to society, and thereby gains some inner resolution. He has to make his own meaning in a wild world.
