The Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Happy Mother's Day!  Show your mom you appreciate her by not exploiting her labor.  Cut her a check today.  This is the Cinema Club pick for this week, paired with Showgirls, a film I already said I would never watch again.  Between that and last week's Eurovision, feeling very attacked by Movie Club's choices.  And then there's this piece of shit!  I thought, "oh, thank God, a Japanese film.  That can't possibly send blood shooting out of my ears like a cartoon oil rig."  WRONG.  Content warning:  domestic violence, attempted sexual assault, ectopic pregnancy

An entomologist (Eiji Okada) is out bug-hunting in the dunes of the Japanese coast.  He gets so into his search that he misses his train but the friendly local villagers offer him a place to stay.  It's a little weird that he has to climb down a rope ladder to a little house practically buried in the sand but the lady (Kyôko Kishida) inside is super hospitable.  The next morning, of course, the ladder is gone and he is dumbfounded to realize that he is now the metaphorical bug in a jar.  See, the villagers ran a cost-benefit analysis and found that slave labor is way cheaper than paying for countermeasures against erosion.  And the eponymous woman is no help in escaping.  She's been fully indoctrinated and is just thrilled to be given a new man after her last one died.

My first problem is that this movie is two and a half hours long when Rod Serling would have smoked two packs of cigarettes and knocked this same concept out in 23 minutes.  It's a good concept.  It's made well.  The hits keep coming every time you've absorbed one.  All well and good.  But too long.

My second problem is that the protagonist is an asshole.  I get it.  Unlawful confinement, forced labor, the impersonal cruelty of one's captors.  It's hard to maintain a cherub-like demeanor.  But he not only despises this woman for being a stooge for her slavers, he also demands her unpaid labor for himself.  When she works all night, comes in, and he makes her cook dinner and bathe him?  I screeched like a newly hatched cicada.

This is considered a landmark in Japanese and art-house cinema and if I overlook the baked-in misogyny, I can see it.  It's streaming on the Criterion Channel and so is Showgirls, for probably the same reason.