1964 NYT Review
THE first of five Japanese pictures to be shown among the 26 feature entries in the second New York Film Festival went on for the second show last night in Philharmonic Hall. It proved to be a strongly allegorical, strangely engrossing film.Based on a novel by Kobo Abé called "Woman in the Dunes" (also the title of the picture), it is a long, leaden, grueling account of the arguing and quarreling and lovemaking of a man and a woman trapped in a shack at the bottom af a sand pit amid some remote and desolate dunes. Despite its drabness and some tedium, it grips and agitates the mind.
It begins with the man, an entomologist collecting beetles on the dunes, being directed to the shack by anonymous people from whom he has sought shelter for the night. They lower him into the sand pit with a crude block-and-fall, and there he finds the shabby woman who willingly provides him with bed and board.
But when he is ready to leave the next morning, he finds he cannot get out without having a rope lowered to him by the people above. And they are either absent or are scornful and unwilling to help.Then the woman tells him that they are eternally caught — or, at least, must remain there at the will of the people above, who send them water and food.
She explains, too, that she is resigned to existence under these circumstances. "Last year," she says, "a storm swallowed up my husband and child."Further, she shows him the necessity of working hard every day to shovel out the sand that has fallen into the shack during the night.
Of course, the man is indignant. He rages and refuses to help. But slowly he makes his adjustment to this frustrating fate. As the picture progresses, he, too, becomes used to the pit, and at the end he does not want to leave it when he has a chance.
This is the barest outline of the plot of this more than two-hour film, which is crowded with harsh and subtle details of the personal relations of the two. But it is in the projection of these details, which have strong emotional and psychological significances, that the director, Hiroshi Teshigahara, has packed a bewitching poetry and power.
In describing, for instance, the manner in which the man becomes seduced by the physical presence of the woman, he works such subtle pictorial change that the bare body of the drab widow has a warm and attractive glow; and the physical act is suggested with such closeups of faces and limbs that a strong emanation of passion surges from the screen.He also draws from his performers, Eiji Okada as the man (he played the lover in "Hiroshima, Mon Amour") and Kyoko Kishida as the woman, some sharp and devastating glints of anger sadness, compassion, gratefulness and despair. In a starkly atmospheric setting and with an eerie musical score, this drama develops an engulfing sense of spiritual discouragement and decay.
Obviously, it is intended to symbolize the absorption of man and the alienation of his spirit by all the demands and oppressions of his environment. The soul of the individual is clearly challenged in this existentialist realm, and it is reduced to resignation and surrender.
Not a happy but a hypnotic film."Woman in the Dunes" took the Special Jury Prize at this year's Cannes festival and will be distributed in this country by Pathè-Contemporary. No theater booking in New York is yet set.
The Cast
WOMAN IN THE DUNES (Suno No Onna), screeplay by Kobo Abe; directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara; produced by Kiichi Ichikawa and Tadashi Ohono for Teshigahara Productions. At Philharmonic Hall. Running time: 123 minutes.The Teacher . . . . . Eiji OkadaThe Woman . . . . . Kyoko Kishida