Cinema: A New Kind of Life

Woman in the Dunes. One day a man leaves the city and wanders into the desert. He wanders alone, and over his shoulder he carries a net. He is searching, he says, for a new kind of life, for a creature that will bear his name and make him in some sense immortal. All day the solitary figure (Eiji Okada) moves among the moving sands, but he does not find what he is seeking. At sunset a stranger appears, a man at home in the desert, and leads him to a deep pit.

In the bottom of the pit, a hundred feet down, stands a house. "You can spend the night there," the stranger says. Hand over hand the man descends a rope ladder. In the house he finds a peasant woman who gives him plain food to eat and a plain mat to sleep on. In the morning he rises early to be on his way, but when he looks for the ladder it is gone. "Please don't blame me," the woman says gently. "Remember, you came here of your own accord." He stares at her, incredulous. "Are you trying to tell me," he asks in rising alarm, "that I can't get out of here-that I'm trapped?"

The spectator shudders-perhaps not simply in sympathy. The modern mind has an allergy to allegory, and this story is plainly a metaphor performed: the man and woman are meant to be everyman and everywoman, and life is the hellhole they are in. But the metaphor is grand, the allegory clothes the powerful narrative as patterns clothe a python. In his second film, a 37-year-old Japanese painter named Hiroshi Tesh-igahara has transformed a tricky-turgid novel into a luminous and violent existential thriller, an Oriental Pilgrim's Progress.

"Time is important to me!" the trapped man cries angrily as he charges up the palisades of sand that rise on all sides; they collapse and almost bury him. Undaunted, he climbs the rope that lowers supplies into the pit; when the rope is released, he drops 30 feet and almost breaks his neck. Frustrated on all sides, he turns upon the woman his rage to live. He possesses her, unaware at first that in grappling with the woman he is also grappling with the reality she represents: the appalling predicament he is in.

It grows more appalling by the minute. Driven by the wind, by an invisible power in the sky, a river of sand flows endlessly over the rim of the pit. In a matter of days it would drown the house and anyone in it. So every night and all night long, while the wind lies still and the air is cool, the woman shovels sand into buckets and sends the buckets up the rope. If no sand comes out of the pit, she explains, no food will be sent back in return. The man is aghast. "Don't you feel that all this is meaningless?" he asks. "Moving sand to live, living to move sand?"

One dark night, with the help of a rope he has woven and a grappling hook he has made, the man at last escapes from the pit. Free! In rapture he races aimlessly among the big black dunes. In horror he feels the sand give way beneath his feet. He has escaped from one pit only to fall into another-a pit of quicksand! "Help!" he screams. "Help!" His life is saved but his freedom is lost; the men who pull him out of the quicksand put him back in the pit. In blank hatred he stares at the sand, at his fate.