Woman in the Dunes

When this was last shown locally (August 2007), I wrote, “The basic setup isn’t far removed from a horror film with its hapless entomologist (Eiji Okada, Hiroshima, Mon Amour) missing his train, being offered shelter for the night, and then finding himself a prisoner of the locals. He’s lowered into a pit to serve as the helpmate and husband of a nameless woman (Kyôko Kishida, Bushido). Once the rope ladder is hauled up, he’s trapped there, forced to live in her very rudimentary ramshackle house, reliant on outsiders to bring provisions (including water), and pressed into helping her shovel sand into buckets in order to prevent the house from being buried. … By turns the film is horrific (not just the setup, but a later sequence where the populace try to get the couple to put on a sex show for them), poetic, romantic and even political. A good case can be made for the film as a depiction of exploited workers who are so bamboozled by the powers that be that they consider themselves lucky to get what they do, but that’s only one aspect of the movie. As much as that, it’s a film about textures. Woman in the Dunes is perhaps the most tactile movie ever made: the shifting sand, the bodies of the man and the woman (often viewed in abstract bits and pieces), a drop of water etc. There’s an astonishing sense of actually being able to feel all this that is unique to the film. If any piece of art-house cinema can be called an essential, this mesmerizing, haunting work can.” Full review is available at www.mountainx.com/movies/review/woman_in_the_dunes