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Rating: The Sand Inside Us.
There are films that take on a particular meaning depending on the context and the condition in which one finds themselves at the time of viewing. I watched this "Woman in the Dunes" one evening during a personal retrospective of Hiroshi Teshigahara in Milan in '93, in a ghostly nocturnal city, shrouded in fog with very few living souls about.
Hiroshi is a figure in contemporary art and besides numerous installations and performances of Taoist inspiration, he has four films to his credit, all written with Kobe Abe (author of the homonymous novel) and with the musical contribution of Toru Takemitsu.
'Suna no onna' (Woman in the Dunes) is a splendid 1964 film that narrates, I might say in a Kafkaesque manner, the relationship of man with events and chance, in a continuous exchange of perceptions and stimuli that constantly alter his perceptual state and the endlessly changeable view of reality. Everything changes, it seems to want to tell us; it evolves and determines the very limits of the human condition in which we wish to live.
A very sparse film, with an almost theatrical setup, brimming with spirituality and Zen in every scene, it speaks of a lone man, an insect collector, lost in a symbolic desert. A man who cannot meet anyone and does not know why he is there. After being hosted by a strange village hidden in the sand dunes, he decides to spend some time within this new reality.
He starts becoming a resident in a house that, like others, lies at the bottom of this immense pit continuously threatened by sand pressing on the four walls. The house's owner is eternally busy shoveling away the sand that daily threatens her tranquility.
Sand therefore as a metaphor for the damnation of living, of the anxiety that makes us lose much of our strength removing existential worries, in a relentless, merciless cycle of continuous suffering with no way out. Sand that kills (it killed the woman's husband and then her daughter), sand that constantly threatens the protagonist's psyche, initially indifferent and then increasingly, as he too remains trapped in the bottom of this hole/existential metaphor, more committed to safeguarding the house and life itself.
It will be to no avail to try to escape from the sandy walls; with each attempt, new avalanches will deter further attempts until there is unconditional surrender to a miserable life, eternally with the shovel in hand removing sand from the walls of a house that sinks ever deeper. Here lies the nihilistic metaphor par excellence whereby the more one tries to escape a situation—the act of shoveling—the more the situation worsens—the house sinking deeper.
One day, the man will manage to escape and return to see the sea, but there his great inner change will happen: outside the world of sand, he will not find the same "sense" as before, now emptied of objectives and meaning, his life will be “being beside that woman” and saving her from the threats looming over the house...only thus will he find the ultimate meaning of living.
Towards the end of the film, we will discover that our character is part of a list of people who have been missing for seven years and have never returned to Tokyo.
A film of impeccable beauty and aesthetic elegance, where every shot is painted like an ancient Japanese ideogram, in an existentialist black and white, a close cousin of the German expressionist school that suits well the essentiality of a story, as we said, animated by a Kafkaesque spirit, where characters find their redemption in the very tragedy of events, and where everything becomes relative and important at the same time in relation to the events themselves.
A film that speaks directly to the soul. A film of few words (it is subtitled) but that drags us into a crescendo of lucid despair, making us sink into abysses of unfillable emptiness, but thanks to this, it makes us transcend to different worlds and possible existences hardly traversable in a single life.
A real gem for connoisseurs and for those seeking any kind of spiritual path (and for lovers of Eastern cinema, in general).
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