Suna no onna
Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964)
An entomologist spends a day at the beach, collecting insects that inhabit the sand dunes. He misses his last bus back to Tokyo. An elderly villager, apparently friendly, proposes that he stay the night locally, in the home of a young widow. Her house is in a deep sand quarry – the scientist gains entry to it by climbing down a rope ladder. The next morning, when he tries to leave, the ladder has gone. He can’t exit without it because the sand keeps collapsing. The villagers inform him that they expect him to stay and become the woman’s helpmate, assisting in her job of digging sand (to be sold for use in concrete and to prevent her quarry home from being buried under it). The widow and her guest become lovers. In spite of several attempts to get away, he never leaves. At the end of Woman in the Dunes, a Tokyo police report appears on the screen. The report states that the entomologist, named as Junpei Niki, who disappeared seven years ago, is a missing person.
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film (also known as Woman of the Dunes), adapted by Kōbō Abe from his own novel, is tough going but rewarding. Through Teshigahara’s sustained visual imagination, expressed in the brilliant black-and-white photography of Hiroshi Segawa, Woman in the Dunes operates at different levels yet is also an integrated whole. This is a survival and attempted escape story; an absurdist parable; a paranoid nightmare of imprisonment; an essay in sensuous contemplation – especially of the patterns and textures of sand, water and flesh. From the very start, as Junpei negotiates an incline on the beach, the film conveys the uncooperative nature of thick, dry sand under his feet – a tiny hint of what’s to come. We soon learn too that the husband and daughter of the (unnamed) woman in the dunes died in a sandstorm.
The entomologist’s fate is to share an under-the-sand existence with the creatures he was collecting for his research. His confinement prompts rebellion but leads to acclimatisation: Junpei keeps trying to escape until he eventually chooses to stay. He uses an improvised grappling hook to get out of the quarry but, once above ground, he’s disorientated and gets trapped in quicksand – from which he’s rescued by the villagers and returned to the widow’s house. He repeatedly attempts to trap a crow to use as a messenger to the world above (which is often viewed in remarkable images from Junpei’s world below). He develops a way of drawing water from the damp sand at night and becomes increasingly absorbed in perfecting the technique. With his hopes of freedom fading, he asks the villagers for a few minutes each day to watch the sea, promising not to abscond. They agree to this on condition that Junpei makes love to the woman while they watch. He tries to oblige but she fends him off. This sequence makes for a startling contrast with earlier, consensual moments between them. The contact between hands and naked flesh, as the man feels the sand on the woman’s body and the woman washes the man, is genuinely erotic.
Junpei makes the woman pregnant but doesn’t realise this until she becomes unwell and the villagers suspect a miscarriage. They take her away to seek medical attention and, in their haste, leave the rope ladder in place. Junpei clambers out but, when he can at last look at the sea, it’s not the vast oasis he anticipated. He now has the chance to escape but decides not to do so, preferring to stay and teach the water-drawing technique to the rest of the community. The buried-in-sand aspect naturally calls to mind Beckett’s Happy Days (first performed the year prior to the publication of Kōbō Abe’s novel in 1962). The hero’s unavailing struggle with the pitiless forces of nature evokes the myth of Sisyphus – in Greek mythology and mid-twentieth-century existentialism. Junpei’s decision to make the best of his absurd situation, stay in the world he didn’t choose to enter and help others further echoes Camus’s brand of humanism.
Eiji Okada, who was already familiar to Western audiences from his lead role in Hiroshima mon amour (1959), is most impressive as Junpei. Okada’s physicality is protean: it’s especially striking that, by the closing stages of the story, Junpei’s appearance is more robust than it was at the start of his captivity. Far from wasting away on his limited rations of food, alcohol and water, he looks to have matured into a new mode of being. Okada has a fine partner in Kyōko Kishida, who suggests that a mix of shrewdness and durability have enabled the woman’s survival. As might be expected, there’s a surfeit of maniacal laughter from Junpei’s captors but the sinister masks they wear at one point are something else. The powerful, dissonant score is by Toru Takemitsu.
5 March 2018
