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"I like to stay at the locals' house," the man said, accepting a gracious invitation after missing the last train back to town. He went to remote deserts (regions) in Japan to collect insects. Villagers led him to a house at the bottom of a manhole, where he climbed down a rope ladder and spent the night with the woman who lived at the bottom of the well. She prepared dinner for him and fanned him while he ate. At night, he woke up to find her outside shoveling sand. In the morning, he saw her sleeping, her naked body glistening with sand. He went out the door to leave. "It's interesting," he muttered to himself, "the ladder is gone."
A harsh melody then announces the astonishing "Daughter of Sand" (1964), one of the very few that combines realism and allegory of life. one of the movies. This man (Okata Ciying) will stay at the bottom of the well and dig sand with the woman, and the sand dug up will be dragged to the ground by the villagers with bags. "If we stop digging sand," explains the woman (Kishida Kishida), "the house will be buried. If we are buried, the house next door will be in danger."
I don't quite understand the mechanics of this explanation, nor Understand the local economy. Villagers sell sand to construction companies, the woman explains. These sands are too salty to meet building standards, but they are sold very cheaply. But surely there must be other options than staying at the bottom of the well and selling sand? Of course, the story is not based on logic, and the director Edict Kawara even explained that there is no way for the sand to pile up on the steep walls like the bottom of a well: "I found that there was no way to make a slope with an angle of more than thirty degrees
. , There is not a moment in this film that does not look full of realism, and this film is not about sand, but life. "Are you digging sand to survive or is survival to dig sand? "A man asks a woman, who wouldn't ask the same question? The Lady of Sand is a modern-day Sisyphus myth about a man punished by the gods who pushes boulders up a mountaintop in eternal reciprocity, Watch it roll down.
To some extent the man can only blame himself. His desert trip was meant to be an escape, he sought solitude and found it successfully. The movie opens with a montage of fingerprints and passport stamps, then a close-up of a grain of sand as big as a boulder, then a few grains of sand the size of a diamond, and the wind rips across the surface of the sand causing ripples, as if it were a puddle water. There has never been an image of sand like this (never, not even in Lawrence of Arabia), and by grounding the story firmly in tangible, natural reality, cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa helps the director achieve a narrative that is as if A difficult feat of fable that is really happening.
Instead of emphasizing action, Takemitsu's soundtrack mocks it, with high, sad notes, rasping like a metallic wind. The first time I saw this movie, it was like a psychosexual adventure. The underlying situation is almost erotic: a wandering man trapped by a woman who sacrifices her body for life in servitude. There is a strong undercurrent of lust, which begins when the woman shows off her jade body.
The Sand Lady uses vision to create a texture about sand, skin, water seeping into the sand and changing its properties better than any other film I can think of. It's not how seductive this woman is, it's that you can totally feel the sensation of touching her skin when you look at her. Sex in movies is part of the overall reality: at the bottom of this well, where life regresses to work, sleep, food, and sex, when this woman wants a radio "so we can get the latest news," she's just more Underscores how pointless that would be.
The script was adapted from Kobo Abe's own novel, revealing the extreme evil in this situation slowly and calmly, not rushing to declare the man's moral dilemma, but revealing and establishing the daily life of the dunes in small hints and insights rhythm. The residents at the bottom of the well are taken care of by the villagers above. They use small cranes to drop water and daily necessities, and then drag them on to the sand. Whether this woman went down into the well voluntarily or was let down by the villagers has never been clear, there is no doubt that she accepted her fate and would not run away even if she could. She participated in the capture of this man because she had to: Alone, she couldn't dig enough sand to get ahead of the wind, and her survival -- her food and water -- depended on her Work. Also, her husband and daughter were buried in a sandstorm, she told the man, "Bone is buried here." So they were both captured, one accepted their fate and the other tried to escape.
The man made all his attempts to climb out of the well, and there was a shot where the whole wall of sand poured down, so smooth and sudden that it made one's heart tremble. As a naturalist, he developed an interest in his environment, in the birds and insects that visited. He set traps to catch crows, and while he didn't catch them, he stumbled upon how to get water out of the sand, a discovery that was probably the only tangible, useful, indisputable achievement of his life. All other things, as the narrator (his own voice?) tells us, are contracts, licenses, deeds, ID cards -- "papers for mutual reassurance."
He was 37 when he commissioned Hiroshi Kawahara to direct "The Sand Girl," which won the Cannes Jury Prize and two Oscar nominations. His dad founded a famous flower arrangement school in Tokyo, and I once took a class or two and briefly learned that the possibility of arranging flowers in harmony can be an artistic and philosophical triumph, as well as a form of meditation. He's always been expected to take over the school ("a similar situation to the hero in "The Sand Girl" and its ironic resemblance, Film Notes observes). He seems drawn to diversity, and has produced stories about boxer Jose Torres and Documentary about a woodcut artist, making ceramics, directing operas, performing tea ceremonies, directing seven other films. He also took over the flower arranging school as planned.
The Lady of Sand seems to have disappeared for a few years. I once wanted to rent it for film class, but couldn't find it. At Eshi Kawara Hiroshi's school in Tokyo, the interpreter told me vaguely that the master chose to seek some new direction rather than look back at past works. But now, a new release has just been released by Milestone, an American company dedicated to saving the film, see the 35mm version of the film. I find this new version to be just as aggressive, hard-edged, and challenging as the first one I saw.
Unlike some fables that only feel powerful the first time you see them, but are just hypocritical when you watch them again, The Lady of the Sand maintains its strength because it's a perfect fusion of theme, style, and concept. A man and woman face a common task. They cannot escape. The community depends on them, or more broadly, the world depends on them.
But is struggle the only purpose of struggle? By discovering how the water pump works, the man was able to bring something new into his being. He changed the terms of the deal. You cannot escape this well, but you can make it a better well. A little consolation is always better than nothing.
Original link:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-woman-in-the-dunes-1964
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