Hiroshi Teshigahara’s WOMAN IN THE DUNES examines the meaninglessness of human existence
WOMAN IN THE DUNES (SUNNA NO ONNA) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 19-21, 1:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
On an insect-gathering expedition across a vast landscape of desert sand by the ocean, an entomologist (Eiji Okada) suddenly finds himself trapped in a kind of Sisyphean hell in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Kafka-esque Woman in the Dunes, based on Kōbō Abe’s marvelous novel. The man — his name is given only at the very end — is tricked into moving in with a woman (Kyōko Kishida) who is living in a ramshackle house built deep in a sand dune; the only way out is via a rope ladder that local villagers use to give them their sparse supplies. At first the man thinks it’s all some kind of joke, but as he discovers that there’s no way out — trying to climb the walls of sand just makes more work for him and the woman — he has to reevaluate his surreal situation. Woman in the Dunes is a brutal statement on the futility, desperation, and emptiness of simple human existence. The man is reduced to one of the insects he collects in jars — glass is made of sand, of course — while the woman, whose husband and son died in this ditch, does the cooking and cleaning, their unique identities gone, stripped away by their pointless toil. They are left with seemingly no purpose in life except to serve the strange villagers who occasionally peer down at them as if they were animals in a zoo. “Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?” the man asks the woman, who has clearly resigned herself to her fate. Cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa often shoots the black-and-white film in near darkness, the characters virtually disappearing for brief periods of time, while Tōru Takemitsu’s ominous avant-garde score adds to the intensity. Abe and Teshigahara also collaborated on The Pitfall, The Ruined Map, and The Face of Another, but Woman in the Dunes is their masterwork, a shattering look at the meaninglessness of life. The 123-minute version of Woman in the Dunes (there’s also a recently restored 147-minute director’s cut) is screening February 19-21 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues February 26-28 with Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence and March 5-7 with Joseph Losey’s The Servant.
Japan Society’s five-film, five-month, five-director tribute to writer, critic, scholar, curator, and filmmaker Donald Richie, who died on February 19, 2013, at the age of eighty-eight, comes to a close on the one-year anniversary of his passing in appropriate fashion, with a screening of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s second narrative feature, After Life, Kore-eda’s eminently thoughtful film about two of his recurring themes: death and memory. Every Monday, the deceased arrive at a way station where they have three days to decide on a single memory they can bring with them into heaven. Once chosen, the memory is re-created on film, and the person goes on to the next step of his or her journey, to be replaced by a new batch of souls. The way station is staffed by guides, including Takashi Mochizuki (Arata), Shiori Satonaka (Erika Oda), and Satoru Kawashima (Susumu Terajima), whose job it is to interview the new arrivals and help them select a memory and then bring it to life on-screen. Some want to take with them an idyllic moment from childhood, others a remembrance of a lost love, but a few are either unable to or refuse to come up with one, which challenges the staff. Twenty-one-year-old Yūsuke Iseya declares, “I have no intention of choosing. None,” while seventy-year-old Ichiro Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito) is having difficulty deciding on the exact moment, reevaluating and reflecting on the life he led. (Ichiro’s wife is played by Kyōko Kagawa, who has also appeared in films by Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and Kenji Mizoguchi, three seminal directors whose work was previously shown in the Japan Society series.) As the week continues, the guides look back on their lives as well, sharing intimate details, one of which leads to an emotional finale.
Based on a true story documented in Georges Devereux’s 1951 book, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which features an introduction by Margaret Mead, Palme d’Or nominee Jimmy P. details the fascinating relationship between French-Hungarian ethnologist, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst Devereux (Mathieu Amalric) and Native American Blackfoot James Picard (Benicio del Toro). A WWII veteran living in Montana in 1948, Picard is taken to Topeka Winter Hospital after suffering from debilitating headaches and temporary blindness. When doctors Menninger (Larry Pine), Holt (Joseph Cross), Braatoy (Ricky Wayne), and Jokl (Elya Baskin) can’t find anything physically wrong with Picard — and wonder whether their unfamiliarity with Indians is limiting their understanding of his problems — Menninger calls in his colleague Devereux, a Freudian who is having difficulty getting a full-time position because of some of the unusual methods he employs. An excited Devereux immerses himself in Picard’s case, getting the direct, not-very-talkative Blackfoot to soon start opening up about his personal life, share his dreams, and discuss his military experiences. While the other doctors disagree with one another on what Devereux is doing, he and Jimmy develop a unique friendship, two very different men trying to find their place in life. Director Arnaud Desplechin wrote the screenplay (with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones) specifically for Amalric and del Toro, and it’s a terrific pairing, the former, who has previously starred in Desplechin’s
Based on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s awesome Infernal Affairs (2002), Martin Scorsese’s relatively faithful remake, The Departed, moves the relentless action and intrigue from Hong Kong to the mean streets of Boston, where it is hard to tell cop from criminal. Just out of the academy, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) rises quickly to detective in the Special Investigations Unit, but he’s actually in cahoots with master crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Meanwhile, Billy Costigan (an excellent Leonardo DiCaprio), training to become a cop, is sent deep undercover (including a prison stint) to infiltrate Costello’s gang, with only Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sergeant Dignam (a very funny and foul-mouthed Mark Wahlberg) aware of the secret mission. Sullivan and Costigan are like opposite sides of the same persona; in between them stands Costello — and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), a psychiatrist who is in a relationship with one and is doctor to the other. As both the cops and the criminals search desperately for their respective rats, no one can trust each other, leading to lots of blood and a spectacular finale. Nicholson has a field day as the aging gangster, chewing up mounds of scenery in his first film with Scorsese, who returned to peak form with his best work since 1990’s Goodfellas. The film was nominated for five Oscars, winning four, for Best Director, Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), Best Adapted Screenplay (William Monahan), and Best Picture, while Wahlberg was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.