Kevin and I are currently working on a podcast about spirituality in film. A movie I recently saw I really wanted to talk about, which won’t make it into the podcast is Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964), an art house classic recently available through Criterion. A search on Rotten Tomatoes brings up a lot of discussion around this movie, but none I’m satisfied with.

Woman in the Dunes opens with an entomologist vacationing in the desert, collecting insects and he misses his bus. A couple villagers invite him to stay the night. They take him to a house in the bottom of a large sand pit where a woman lives. The man climbs down a rope ladder into the pit and the next morning the ladder is gone. The purpose of his kidnapping: To help the woman shovel sand each night which is hauled up and sold by the villagers above. Some vague reference is made that she must shovel or the sand will overtake her house, then the next and so on, but the science of why she’s stuck there is clearly irrelevant. She chooses to be there. The man does not and his attempts to climb the walls of sand sifting into their hole are futile.

Most writing about this film draws obvious parallels to Sisyphus, the mythological character cursed to roll a boulder up a mountain each day only to have it roll back each night. Cinemania went as far as to call it a “promotional video for the Albert Camus Summer Camp.” The conclusion of the film–where the man makes a choice to remain in the pit to tinker with an invention that draws water from the sand and await his unborn child–is described as “dark.” But my experience evoked none of those thoughts. In fact, I found the ending to be quite uplifting.

It seems the premise of a man trapped, living in poverty against his will with a cruel and unusual brood of villagers in control would make for a downer of a flick. But I found Woman to be as much ecclesiastical as it is existential. The man’s life back in Tokyo is loaded with options, but those options don’t equal freedom for him as much as distraction and vanity. Being trapped brings focus to a life, but it also brings suffering. It’s painful to give up distractions. Like losing your cell phone or having to go on a strict diet, the initial pain of subtracting “freedom” gives way to a richer life.

Perhaps Woman hit me differently because I live in a small city in the Midwest. I have friends and family constantly asking me, “When are you moving to Chicago?” or, “You really ought to move to LA.” They speak as if I just need somebody to point the way to one of those cities before the scales fall from my eyes and I go. But there are a few things I want from life I get in rich supply here. I don’t think A Woman in the Dunes is so much about a man eeking his existence out in a bleak pit of sand, but about bringing an audience around to seeing how luscious and beautiful a big hole of sand can be when seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. Finishing this movie and calling it bleak is pigeon holing it into an art house cliché it clearly transcends.