“When it comes to legendary cinematic partnerships, the triple threat of director Hiroshi Teshigahara, screenwriter Kobo Abe, and composer Toru Takemitsu deserve to be considered alongside, say, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, or even, more recently, the Coen Brothers. Throughout the 1960s, Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu collaborated on four feature films that remain fascinating in their consistent thematic, visual, and aural interests. Chief among them is a tilt toward moody existentialism that, in the cases of Pitfall (1962) and The Man Without a Map (1968), liven up what might have been mere genre exercises in lesser hands. That moodiness took a turn toward full-blown science fiction in The Face of Another (1966), which chronicled the psychological and philosophical implications of a disfigured man's desire to put on another face, and thus try on another identity.
“Of all their collaborations, though, their 1964 film Woman in the Dunes remains their peak: the most focused, mysterious, and disturbing of their cinematic explorations of the slippery nature of human identity. The plot, such as it is, is pure allegory: An amateur entomologist and schoolteacher (Eiji Okada, whose most famous previous role had been as Emmanuelle Riva's love interest in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour) vacationing and collecting bugs in a remote village is tricked by locals into becoming the captive of a woman (Kyoko Kishida) living in a sand dune whose existence is defined solely by the sand she shovels and raises up to the surface for the villagers to sell for money.
“But the allegorical implications of this premise and the ensuing relationship between these two characters are startlingly multifaceted. The existential import of a woman who has no conception of an existence beyond ‘shoveling sand to live’ will surely be obvious to those in ostensibly ‘civilized’ society who have little to sustain them spiritually beyond their 9-to-5 jobs. But then, despite the entomologist's evocations to the woman of the potentially enriching joys of living in Tokyo, is his own existence that much better: one in which his only goal in life is to get mentioned in a famous magazine for discovering a new kind of insect? Even the broader village community of which the entomologist, and by extension us in the audience, get only the barest glimpse suggests something real: a patriarchal society in which the literal higher-ups carelessly exploit those down below for the sake of monetary profit (and, in one particular instance, the possibility of some unsavory sexual titillation).
“Teshigahara brings a wealth of visual and aural detail in bringing Abe's richly imagined allegorical universe to the screen. Totesu Hirakawa and Masao Yamazaki's design of the woman's dwelling in the dunes is appropriately earthy, while Hiroshi Segawa's camera doesn't shy away from emphasizing the sweat, dirt, and grit on these characters. But even more so than the occasional insect sounds that punctuate the film's soundtrack, it's Toru Takemitsu's score—with its Penderecki-like dissonances at times evoking the screeching of insects—that helps infuse Woman in the Dunes with the visionary fervor that makes it viscerally unsettling rather than just intellectually stimulating. Rarely has the revelation of a person's name and fate felt so much like a punch to the gut as it does at the very end of Teshigahara's masterpiece.” ~ Kenji Fujishima
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