Zach Vasquez
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: one day, a man wakes up transformed into a bug. How about this one: a guy is forced to push a boulder up a hill every day for all eternity. What if I told you they were the same story?
Hiroshi Teshigahara, one of the preeminent directors of the Japanese New Wave, understood this when he teamed up with screenwriter Kobo Abe to adapt the latter’s 1962 novel Woman in the Dunes two years later. The resulting effort is not only one of the most visually stunning and hypnotic films of its era (or since), it’s also one of the great existentialist works of cinema, a masterpiece worthy of the absurdist vision of Franz Kafka (particularly the insectoid terror of his 1915 novella The Metamorphosis) and the stoic heroism of Albert Camus (who, in his 1942 philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” posits that we must imagine that doomed figure from Greek mythology happy in his ceaseless labor).
The plot of Dunes follows the logic of a bad dream: while on a three-day holiday, Tokyo school teacher/ amateur entomologist Junpei (Eiji Okada) stumbles upon an impoverished coastal village while collecting insects. After falling asleep and missing the last bus back to the city, he is offered shelter by the villagers, who lower him down into a pit at the bottom of a giant sand dune. There, he finds a dilapidated house tended to by an attractive but unsettlingly awkward young widow (Kyōko Kishida), who takes him in for the night.
Upon waking, the man discovers that the rope ladder has been pulled up by the villagers and he’s been trapped, not unlike one of the bugs collected in his glass specimen tubes. The woman—sympathetic to his fear and fury, if not his larger predicament—explains that he is the latest wanderer to be imprisoned by the village, who require laborers to shovel the never-ending sandslides that would otherwise swallow up their homes. However, this explanation may be a ruse disguising something deeper and more inexplicable, with Junpei asking his fellow pit dweller, “Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?”
(There is also a heavy political dimension to the film that shouldn’t be discounted. Abe, an avowed communist, had grown disillusioned after witnessing the suppression of Polish artists by their government, as well as the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956. The destruction of individuality in the name of the supposed collective good in Dunes can very easily be read as a critique of the totalitarian nature of the USSR, which makes it hardly surprising that Abe was expelled from the party in the months following the film’s release.)
What follows is a battle of wits and attrition between Junpei and his captors, as well as his new domestic partner, the latter of which slowly but surely takes on a violently erotic dimension. The nightmarish simplicity of Dunes’s story is supplemented by the complexity of its mis-en-scène, particularly the way Teshigahara frames the ever-shifting, seemingly sentient sand. The shots of Junpei struggling up the dunes, only for the ground below him to break apart into mini-avalanches, are amongst the most astonishing depictions of man versus nature ever captured on celluloid.
Teshigahara is as well known for his work in other media — particularly ikebana, the art of flower arrangement — as he is for film, so it should come as no surprise that Woman in the Dunes makes for an extremely tactile experience. Grittier than any Frank Herbert adaptations to date, slicker than Body Heat at its sweatiest, and more biophobia-inducing than even Japan’s other great black-and-white rural erotic horror parable from the same year, Onibaba, Dunes was a big hit on the global arthouse scene at the time of its release.
Woman in the Dunes won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes ‘64, and would go on to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 38th Academy Awards. Teshigahara would become the first Japanese person to nab a Best Director nom at the following year’s ceremony (the Oscars used to have bizarre eligibility date rules). It was the most successful of the four feature collaborations between Teshigahara and Abe, and is regarded as one of the most iconic titles not just of the Japanese New Wave, but the art house boom of the ‘60s as a whole. Although I wasn’t able to find any examples of David Cronenberg discussing Dunes, I feel like it had to be a major influence on him.
And yet, it was one of those movies that, per Roger Ebert in his retrospective review from 1998, “seemed to disappear.” That changed when the Criterion Collection released it, alongside two other Teshigahara/Abe collabs (Pitfall, 1962; The Face of Another; 1966) in 2007. That box set has since gone out of print, although the company gave Dunes its own release on Blu and DVD in 2016.
Now, with Criterion uploading that first set of films onto their streaming service, Woman in the Dunes is finally widely available for a new audience—arthouse connoisseurs, fans of Japanese cinema, or hell, viewers who were emotionally taken with the Camus-ian bent of Coyote vs. Acme—who will no doubt find its eerie and erotic existentialism and purgatorial pleasures utterly inescapable.
“Woman in the Dunes” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
