Film Comment: Woman in the Dunes

Suna no Onna (Woman in the Dunes) is a 1964 Japanese black and white language film which received two Oscar nominations and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. An insect collector (Okada Eiji) from Tokyo escapes his terribly boring existence by spending his spare time in the desert region of Japan, collecting bugs and staying at the homes of the locals. On his latest trip, the only place to stay is with a woman (Kishida Kyoko) who lives at the bottom of a sand pit. The man happily climbs down the ladder into the pit to spend the night.

When the collector wakes up the ladder is gone and the walls of the sand pit are sliding down into the house. Then he gets the surprise; he is expected to stay with the woman and help her shovel sand away from the house. In return, he gets her. He struggles mightily to leave, but soon, he gives in and wouldn't leave even if he could.

The woman is the sugar and the glue, and the pit is the trap. The man is the fly, but he doesn't struggle for long because the sugar is so sweet. To be sure the viewer gets it, though nothing explicit is shown, nudity and phallic symbols appear. Before he is even aware of it, the man doesn't want to leave his hopeless situation.

Obviously an allegory, the film lacks any logical story sense, being more of a situation than a narrative. The man finds himself trapped in a situation for which he is partially responsible; he didn't have to climb down into the pit and he should have known better.

Many things which on their surfaces may seem to be benign, innocent, or essentially harmless, can ensnare us like the Woman in the Dunes. Some situations and activities (ie: gambling, smoking, egoism, recreational drug use, pornography, alcohol consumption, flirting, overeating, obsessive volunteerism, obsession with a hobby or one's career, etc) must be avoided because of their ability to ensnare us in unexpected ways which can escalate out of our control and from which it is difficult to extricate ourselves.