MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Dunes’ Sifts Through Human Nature

Beach lovers beware. “Woman in the Dunes”--being shown at UC Irvine tonight as the campus film society’s “Love and Madness” series continues--can squash any thoughts of idyllic days spent lying on gentle sand.

In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s existential classic, sand is a relentless enemy that makes life miserable. Talk about a bad day at the shore--an unassuming entomologist (Eiji Okada) visits the beach to study insects and ends up trapped in a pit with a strange woman (Kyoko Kishida). No matter how hard he tries, he can’t get out; he becomes a hopeless Sisyphus clawing at the shifting dunes.

The 29-year-old black-and-white movie was based on a novel by Kobo Abe and captures the book’s blend of dense drama and philosophical attitude. The novel, in its quiet, deliberate way, is at once a mystery, a horror story and a love story, and Teshigahara is true to all that.

Much of the film’s impact comes as the entomologist comes to terms with his fate. At first he is angry, but as things become more impossible, he accepts them: The urban complications of Tokyo, his home, start to blur and are replaced by his understanding of this new situation, which has brutalized but also simplified him. Teshigahara is offering an allegory on man’s uneasy relationship with nature and the process by which we find balance in a hostile environment.

“Woman in the Dunes” was only the director’s second film but already he was showing an intuitive grasp of the medium. His earlier career as a painter is reflected in the way he frames his scenes. The movie also reveals a graceful collaboration between Teshigahara and Segawa, one of Japan’s more important cinematographers of the ‘60s, an especially experimental time for cinema there.

Segawa infuses “Woman in the Dunes” with an expressionistic veneer based on close-ups and romanticized sweeps over the raw landscape. His dunes contrast with the few people who inhabit this desolation, giving both a starkly sensual aura. And it’s the camera, as much as anything, that carefully metes out the steps of the protagonist’s psychological adjustment.

* “Woman in the Dunes” (1964) by Hiroshi Teshigahara is being shown tonight at 7 and 9 in the Crystal Cove Auditorium at the UC Irvine Student Center. $2 to $4. (714) 856-6379.