Two years after The Face of Another and Pitfall, and seven years after I first fell asleep trying to watch it, I finally make it to/through Woman in the Dunes. I know that sentence makes moviewatching seem like a chore, but this was one I’ve been really looking forward to – a movie I knew I would totally love, so it might as well be saved for a special occasion, like staying home from work unable to sleep from painful poison ivy.

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This was made in between the other two, and shares their shining, silvery black-and-white cinematography. An entomologist is allowed to stay at a woman’s house in a sand pit but is not allowed to leave. He rages against his situation, declares the sand illogical, tries to escape through cleverness and trickery, and finally (over months, years) resigns himself to it, living with her and helping to fill buckets with sand to be sold by the villagers for building material.

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At first he doesn’t trust the woman, then he wants to help her get out, then the villagers gather around the edge of the hole offering him favors if he’ll have sex with her in front of them, and finally they’re an acting married couple, and she’s being lifted out of the hole with pregnancy complications, leaving him a chance to escape which he doesn’t take.

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Funny enough, the same week I watched this, Criterion put out a Japanese movie from a year earlier called Insect Woman, a title this film could’ve stolen.

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James Quandt’s essay points out the common theme of breaks in identity from Pitfall and Face of Another – the teacher gives up his life of collecting, identifying and documenting and accepts his captive life in the desert. And hey, Quandt saw the same parallel images of sand-flecked bodies between this and Hiroshima mon amour that I was noticing – good for us.

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The man, Eiji Okada, is the same actor from Hiroshima mon amour, which is probably why that occurred to me. He later appeared in The Face of Another, Crazed Fruit, Samurai Spy, and in the last year of his life, Stairway to the Distant Past. I’m not sure who the dune woman, Kyôko Kishida, played in Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, but she also starred in Manji which I’d like to see.

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IMDB: “What do an elderly topiary gardener, a retired lion tamer, a man fascinated by mole rats, and a cutting-edge robotics designer have in common?” That’s what I set to find out while watching this very fun, good-looking and well-edited movie. Katy got tired an hour in, liked it for the most part but didn’t enjoy my connection-drawing game.

Dave was a lion trainer who traveled with the circus. He seems ambivalent about his career, not talking it up as a great time with his beloved lions or an exhilarating and rewarding experience, mostly going over the reasons for first wanting to be involved (he idolized and eventually worked with Clyde Beatty, animal trainer and entertainer who once co-starred with Mickey Spillane in a weird-sounding mystery called Ring of Fear) and the procedures and dangers involved.

George is an elderly gardener who creates, trims and maintains the topiary sculptures in one estate garden. You get the feeling there used to be one old woman who oversaw the garden, and now there’s nobody, that he’s gardening for himself on someone else’s land. Unlike Dave, who is helping train newcomers, George has nobody following in his footsteps, and dislikes other gardeners’ methods (using electric hedge trimmers, for example).

Raymond studies and “wrangles” insects, and has become a specialist in the naked mole-rat, a mammal that exhibits insect-like behavior. He sets up a museum installation to put their society on display, and talks about their activity and relationships.

Rodney is a robot scientist trying to innovate robotic movement and behavior by putting together bunches of small robots or processes which try to solve common tasks, instead of attempting to control them with one larger intelligent system.

There are plenty of ways to link these four guys and their jobs/interests, not a large hidden theme which is the One True Key to unlocking the film. They all work with non-human life forms, trying to study and control behavior. Some offer insights into human behavior through the lens of their subjects. All but Dave work with arrays of smaller beings (robots/leaves/rats) which work together towards large tasks (or forms). I had more but I’ve forgotten half of them… IMDB commenters mention themes of growth and development, consciousness and death, or the guys as representative of different concepts of god’s existence.

I loved the editing, the music (by Caleb Sampson, who killed himself the following year), the use of stock footage (such as old Clyde Beatty films) instead of the Mr. Death re-enactments, the pacing. The movie’s got heart… these guys are really involved in what they’re doing, care about it, and each is able to express himself and his subject in an engaging, philosophic way. It’s not the connections and differences between these guys which are interesting in themselves, it’s the way Morris encourages the viewer to discover them. Wonderful.

Starting with the twist-ending back-story… Lesbian entomologist Ida (see, it’s already unique) can’t find a date because her bugs scare people, cute girl sits in her office lobby stalking her for years, cute girl is daughter of Ida’s ex-prof super bug guy who ships scary bug from brazil or someplace to infect brain of Ida and lay eggs in her so daughter won’t date her, but they start dating first, then bug gets daughter, and finally bug gets ’em both, kills Ida’s male friend, and they are happy and pregnant with 1000’s of bugs together. Sort of like that episode of Creepshow except instead of an unappealing dude there’s two girls kissing… a marked improvement.

Effects are silly, plastic bugs and full-body bug-suits, but all well used. Ida is May from the movie May, has a cool voice, and stalker girlfriend is softcore porn star Misty Mundae. Fun flick, not bad at all.

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