Its strength is its simplicity. It’s a man trapped in a hole in the desert with a woman and that’s it, Charlie. That and a whole lot of sand are pretty much all that director Hiroshi Teshigahara works with here and he finds white hot suspense in the set-up and doesn’t shy away from the sexual implications.
The two leads are powerfully rendered, longing personalities. He’s an academic from Tokyo out collecting rare insects only to get captured and collected himself by a village who need help shoveling the sands that blow into everyone’s lives daily. She’s a pretty and sad-eyed desert rat with a dead family and the worst house in movie history. It’s a drafty shack at the bottom of an inescapable canyon. Can’t get out, can’t get in, not without a ladder, controlled by the villagers, dropped from above.
To our insect collector, it’s a prison; to our widow, it’s home. She’s part of the desert. When we see her sleep nude early in the film her body lines are exactly like the shapes of the dunes. Teshigahara fills the screen with extreme close-ups of sand and flesh until they almost look the same. The wind-blown skittering of sand down a hill becomes sexually suggestive. The shoveling becomes like any regular job. The film’s theme is plain to see under the crystal clear water of the story. Everything here is a metaphor for the daily patterns of modern life. Work to live, dream of escape. Vacation becomes its own drudgery (the lead character gets trapped in his vacation spot). Break the pattern, but watch out—there’s quicksand out there. Maybe, eventually, one makes peace. Sounds dark, but if you ask me, this is optimistic. Or at least it’s realistic. Every now and then, they’re the same.