Suna no onna [Woman in the Dunes] (1964)

(Criterion Streaming, November 2022) So here we are, in late fall, when tackling down the next few films in my “to watch before the end of the year” list takes precedence over crowd-pleasing entertainment. The next film on The List: Japanese surrealist drama Woman in the Dunes, in which a scientist is pushed into a giant sand pit where he meets a tormented woman and must serve the nearby villagers (who sent him down in the pit, and took away the ladder) by providing them with buckets of sand. Yes, really. I have enough problems relating to black-and-white Japanese films of the 1960s filled with action and spectacle that this arthouse special was a bit of an ordeal. It’s not so much the weird topic (I’ve seen much, much weirder), but the execution that takes its toll—specifically the almost unbearable two hours and a half it takes from beginning to end. There isn’t enough plot here to justify that running time, and that’s clearly an avowed feature of the film: Director Hiroshi Teshigahara (working from a screenplay by Kōbō Abe, adapting his own novel) clearly means this to be a slow-cinema kind of thing, a meditative experience that gives the viewer time enough to reflect on the allegorical nature of the film. But what will work splendidly well with other viewers just felt obnoxious to me—while I could appreciate some of the sandy cinematography, the rest of Woman in the Dunes didn’t give me any reason to play along with its symbolic games or social parables. At least, at the end of the credits, I can at least say I’ve seen it. One less film on the checklist…