Woman in the Dunes
October. 25,1964 NRA vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.
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I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
As Good As It Gets
Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
"Woman in the Dunes" follows a fledgling entomologist who is searching for sand beetles in remote sand dunes along the coast. After his bus leaves the area without him, he is given a place to sleep in the home of a woman who resides at the bottom of a pit; her hospitality however is mistaken when he discovers he has been tricked by the locals into being enslaved with her, doomed to continuously shovel the sand spilling down on them, or be buried alive.A parable on futility and the human condition, or just a maddening new wave psychological drama, "Woman in the Dunes" was released in the 1960s to considerable acclaim, and helped put the Japanese new wave on the map. Based on the novel by Kōbō Abe, the film doesn't so much engage on a purely narrative level, as the narrative is fairly thin. The real grit of the film lay in the relationship between the two characters as they fight to survive, and also as they fight one another.The film is rife with sexual undertones, as the mad villagers aim for the man to reproduce with the woman as some twisted form of entertainment. In one striking and haunting scene, the villagers arrive at night donning masks, and watch from the edges of the pit for the two to fight like dogs at their enjoyment. "Who cares?" he asks her, tackling her to the ground. "We're living like animals anyway." On a purely visual level, the film is dazzling. The camera revels in textures and tones, capturing the liquid motions of the sand with surprising detail. Close-ups of skin and surfaces slowly being inundated with grains of sand are ubiquitous and beautifully-shot.Eiji Okada and Kyôko Kishida both turn in fantastic performances that run the gamut of emotional territory. The two engage on terms that are sometime cordial, sometimes sexual, and sometimes violent. The energy between the two is palpable, and their psychological energy comes across with surprising clarity. Their levels of desperation rise in the last act, and the tension is pulled like a tight-wire. Running just under three hours, one may expect the film to drag a bit, but I found it surprisingly engaging throughout, and I largely credit that to the two leads who make it impossible to look away from the screen.Overall, "Woman in the Dunes" is a subtle and engaging surrealist drama with shades of a thriller and at times even horror. It recalls the survivalist desperation of something like "Lord of the Flies," but is profoundly more surreal, without ever taking its audience for granted. Many reviewers have seemed to echo the sentiment that the film is profound and artistic without being pretentious or ostentatious, and I completely agree. It strikes a balance in which its entertainment value is not sacrificed for its aesthetic and thematic goals, which is rare, especially in the art-house world. I've never seen anything quite like it. 10/10.
Woman in the dunes is a great step in Japanese cinematography because Teshigahara, the movie's director, was the first Japanese director to be nominated for an Oscar - and it is truly amazing that, back in 1964, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were able to realize the greatness of this movie.It all starts with the entomologist Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada), alone, walking in the desert, looking for insects. No dialogue, just beautiful cinematography and games of light and shadow. He is invited by the local villagers to spend the night in the home of a widow (Kyôko Kishida), at the bottom of a sandpit, since he has missed the last bus to the city. This does not upset him, he's interested in their way of life, therefore he accepts. But the next morning he discovers the villagers trapped him - just like he traps his beloved insects - and expect him to live with the woman and help her collect the sand daily, receiving food and water in return. So he tries to escape this claustrophobic environment.Where should I begin? This movie has "masterpiece" written all over it. The two main (and almost only) characters are at the same time opposite and similar - opposite in their reaction to the imprisonment, similar in their loneliness and pointlessness of lives that they cherish nonetheless. Okada and Kishida put up amazing performances which make you forget they're just acting. But perhaps the true protagonist is the sand: the dangerous, devastating force that brings purpose to those who have learned to handle and make good use of it. A lot of scenes in the movie show it moving, changing, and always remaining the same, and they are never out of place. It dictates the lives of the people, and one is forced to love it in a perverted, Stockholm syndrome-sque kind of way, just like the widow does even after the sand has killed her husband and daughter. To make the movie fit its gloomy story even better, it was filmed in natural light; also, a lot of important things happen at night (for example, an attempt to escape) and even though you can hardly see anything, you know exactly what's going on. This creepy atmosphere is perfected by what's probably one of the best soundtracks of all time (composed by Toru Takemitsu), since it suits the picture incredibly well, making you feel uncomfortable and scared from the first minutes. And, as a conclusion, there is a sentence, said by the entomologist towards the end of the movie, which, in my opinion, sums up its message: We're pigs anyway. Simple yet powerful, just like everything else in Woman in the dunes.Rating: 9/10 Read more at http://passpopcorn.wordpress.com/
Suna no onna is a splendidly profound minimalistic odyssey, a spiralling journey towards the core of oneself, towards an inner paradise, the ultimate Eden-oasis (suggested by the discovery of a new water source, and implicitly a new life, in the depths of the dunes); the ending is not a capitulation, it is finding the right balance and a path to be at peace and free, freedom that comes from within; the constraints, first those of the urbanistic web with its bureaucratic chains from which Niki Jumpei tries to escape through surrogate passions (entomology, photography) and then the natural ones, with the dunes acting like a hungry ghost's mouth wanting to devour its inhabitants, haunt our Ulysses on his inner sea peregrination, luring him with the woman, like a siren with her spectral body floating between the wavy dunes, and finally force him to face himself and ultimately to make a choice and gain a meaning of his life, paradoxically, beyond any pressure and coercion; the score is gorgeous and abrasive as the sand of the desert, working in perfect harmony with the both dreamy and sharp geometry of the images
Moving effortlessly from the banal, the scientific, curious and the surreal to the unsettling, chilling, lonely, erotic, ugly and ultimately the deeply moving this is a truly remarkable film which was for me an accidental find.I've since viewed the other films in the trilogy of which this a part and while of interest, they lacked the raw simplicity of this film, with it's almost shocking, symbol-laden premise.Compelling performances with an extremely limited palette should make this art-house fodder but the depth of the characterisation transcends the gentle pace and simple plot. Highly recommended.