Woman in the Dune

The movie Woman in the Dunes by the director Hiroshi Teshigahara is based on Kobo Abe's novel of the same name. The novel was published in 1962 and the film came out two years later.

The main characters, a woman and a man, live in a sand the dune and have to shovel the sand every night to prevent their home from collapsing. Unlike Sisyphus, they work to survive not as a punishment.

There are many allegories and methaphors in the movie. For example, the shifting sand is like the shifting nature of identity. At the end, the man found how to collect water from the dune; to me it seems like the concept of the absurd put forth by Albert Camus. Wet and dry, life and death, extrication and entanglement. I think I will read Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus again.