Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Screenplay by Kobo Abe from his novel
Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa
Music by Toru Takemitsu
Edited by Fusako Shuzui
Art Direction by Totetsu Hirakawa and Masao Yamazaki
Produced by Kiichi Ichikawa and Tadashi Ono
Starring
Eiji Okada as Man from Tokyo
Kyoko Kishida as Woman in the Dunes
…
"Are you shoveling sand to live, or living to shovel sand?"
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
A disenchanted man leaves Tokyo for a sandy coastal area-I guess it's a beach, but when he's in the thick of it . . . well . . . it's something beyond beach. This disenchanted man has very likely left behind a wife and a career as a teacher. He lies on his back in a ruined, perma-beached fishing boat, and ruminates on the existential paper trail that defines one's humanity: driver's licenses, tax returns, hunting licenses, gun permits, PTA memberships, IOUs, union cards, contracts,legal depositions, last wills and testaments-all the tedious proofs of himself, of all the people of contemporary Tokyo.
The only physical validation this man willingly seeks is the perfect pinned insect collection. He's especially keen to discover a new species, and get his name into a field guide. Gotta catch 'em all.
Our bug-collector discovers a strange community out in this sandy region of people who live in houses at the bottom of huge pits. They climb in and out by rope ladder. A seemingly unassuming local man greets the bug-collector and tells him it's okay to photograph the landscape and collect bugs so long as he's not secretly working for a government inspector's office. The people of the sandy area seem to want to stay off-grid.
Our bug-collector misses the last bus back into town, and asks the local man if he can stay for the night. Local man offers up one of the houses down in the pit. The offered house is the home of a woman who is more than happy to accommodate the man from Tokyo.
Our bug-collector climbs down the rope ladder, thinking he has found lodging for the night. But he has unwittingly arrived in his new forever home.
The all-too-accomodating woman of the house makes dinner and tea for the disillusioned city slicker. She informs him that the sand draws moisture, gets into everything, and creates decay and rot. The man-tone condescending-tells her that's not how that works.
"Use your common sense!"
But, as we will all discover in the fullness of time, the sand in this place is rather aggressive, and operates according to a different natural regime. The people who live in the pit houses must constantly clean the sand that finds its way onto all surfaces including human bodies. Every morning you wake up with those sinister grains clinging to you, invading every crevice and crack. Life in the pit involves cleaning yourself, your belongings, and shoveling back the encroaching dunes lest they bury you alive.
The woman's husband and daughter were recently consumed by the hungry sands. And our man from Tokyo finds himself conscripted into a sick parody of domesticity as a replacement hubby. The rulers of the sandy area control the rope ladders, and they have no plans to let their latest captive go home.
Our man resists his captivity, but we already know that some part of him was seeking a new life. And, perversely, he has blundered into a new existence. What we see onscreen might be an uncomfortable psychological allegory for rootlessness and lack of belonging. Our man-recently fallen out of love with Tokyo-could be an allegorical figure addressing a deep skepticism about postwar prosperity, maybe even civilization itself.
The people of the sandy area seem to be off-the-grid types, wanting nothing to do with laws and taxes and social norms. And yet they need fresh blood at regular intervals to avoid inbreeding, and so they have to capture outsiders to keep their bizarre way of life going. A brutal and sadistic courtship ritual late in the film graphically illustrates this process. Gotta catch 'em all.
It is eventually revealed that the people of the sandy area fund their anti-civilization by illegally selling the aggressive sand to concrete manufacturers, even though this increases the risk of structural collapse in projects-such as dams, office buildings, government facilities-built with such concrete.
At one point, our man from Tokyo, while in the depths of dehydration, hallucinates the doorframe of the pit house filled with spectral, shimmering water. Sometime after that, he discovers an unlikely source of water via "capillary action" that seems to be the reward of his hallucination. This strikes me as our man being co-opted by the "mind" of the dunes, since I think it's really the aggressive sand which is in charge. The sand inflicts an irresistible force of decay upon our illusions about civilization and domestic contentment. The people of the sandy area are thralls of this power, and they work to ship the sand to their ultimate Enemy: Tokyo.
In the end, we are given a name for our man . . . but it might not be his name anymore.
Maybe that name, and all that it was anchored to, gave him no happiness.
Such discontent may also be the secret power source of the aggressive sand.
