WOMAN IN THE DUNES Movie Review

Suna No Onna
Woman of the Dunes

An entomologist examining beetles in a remote sand dune misses his bus back to the city. Put up for the night by a woman who lives alone at the bottom of a deep sand pit, the entomologist discovers the next morning that he is her prisoner, every bit as trapped as the futilely flailing insects he studies with his magnifying glass. Amid the heat and ever-changing terrain of the shifting sand—which permeates every crevice of the woman's home no matter how often it's shoveled out—the relationship between the two becomes an intense microcosm of sexual co-dependence and a near-Buñuelian examination of the human desire for enslavement. Hiroshi Segawa's cinematography makes the grit and the heat unnervingly palpable, and the haunting score of Toru Takemitsu (recently released on a superb compilation CD) gives Woman in the Dunes an otherworldly air. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara received a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Woman in the Dunes, which is such a perfectly realized adaptation of Kobo Abe's novel that it felt as much like a classic on the day of its release in 1964 as it does 34 years later.

NEXT STOP … The Phantom of Liberty, Tristana, Antonio Gaudi

1964 123m/B JP Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida, Koji Mitsui, Hiroko Ito, Sen Yano; D: Hiroshi Teshigahara; W: Kobe Abe; C: Hiroshi Segawa; M: Toru Takemitsu. Cannes Film Festival ‘64: Grand Jury Prize; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘65: Best Director (Teshigahara), Best Foreign-Language Film. VHS CVC, NYF, VDM