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Woman in the Dunes
A 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.
Year: 1964
Studio: Teshigahara Productions
Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Cast: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida, Hiroko Itō, Kōji Mitsui
Crew: Hiroshi Segawa (Director of Photography), Hiroshi Teshigahara (Director), Kōbō Abe (Novel), Fusako Shuzui (Editor), Kōbō Abe (Screenplay), Kiichi Ichikawa (Producer)
Runtime: 147 minutes
Release: Feb 15, 1964
IMDb: 8.22/10 by 467 users
Popularity: 4
Country: Japan
Language: 日本語
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Keyword : based on novel or book, insect, sand, art house, water shortage, psychological thriller, black and white, held captive, skin, trapped, missing person, sexual torture, sand dune, erotic photography, water pump, japanese new wave, slave labor, entomologist, escape attempt, sand pit, forced labor, texture, avant garde, disappeared, barbaric behavior
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Yikes, but for a film almost entirely set outdoors it’s remarkably claustrophobic! It’s about the exploring bug hunter “Jumpei” (Eiji Okada) who finds himself a bit lost out in the sand dunes after he misses the last bus of the day. A friendly villager offers him some shelter for the night, buy boy is he ill-prepared for quite what that man, and his entire village, has in store. He is placed with a widow, but when he wakes in the morning discovers that her home is deep within a sand well and the only way out is the ladder he climbed down to enter - and that’s gone! It’s a precarious existence for this women (Kyôko Kishida) for if she doesn’t keep the sand levels down, they will swamp her home and swallow her up. The villagers assist in so far as they help dispose of the collected sand and they provide her - and now him - with some weekly rations, but she has no inclination to leave her pit and they seem content to watch him scratch about in the sand just as he was to look at creatures with more legs doing the same. Gradually a bond starts to build between the two, but he is always on the look out for a means of escape, and his captors know that - exacting some torrid vengeance upon both of them as a sort of sport after an attempted escape goes awry. In the end, he begins to realise that it’s distinctly possible that he, she or both may die in the hole and his options aren’t getting any better from day to day. It’s really quite a cerebrally gruesome film to watch this. To see two human beings toyed with as a cat would a mouse is a tough watch and both actors really do deliver strongly, imbuing their scenario with respective senses of acceptance and frustration. At times there are almost cruelly pagan elements to the behaviour on display here, but it is also just possible that there is a scintilla of goodness intended somewhere along the line, too? It’s tautly directed and the sparing but increasingly frenetic dialogue really helps to create a feeling that actually made me feel a little breathless at times. Maybe next time you walk along the beach, you’d best take an escape kit!