ARTS &• AMUSEMENTS
Overcome by Sand
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Woman of the Dunes. (Jacey, Marble Arch, 'X' certificate.)—A King's Story. (Colum-
bia, certificate.)
Woman of the Dunes is an easily mockable, but not I think laughable, film. Mockable because every symbolic work is top-
heavy with its own ambition, an ant staggering under a burden twice its size, and if the author isn't strong or cunning enough to manage his burden he is fairer game than most for mockery. (Think of an untalented Kafka, how funny the plots of his stories would sound.) And the film is a symbolic medium anyway, in the sense that every image is more than itself, suggests and says more than it strictly seems to, so that the story symbolically slanted and the director symboli- cally inclined have a field-day, let loose in all this suggestiveness. In fact filmgoing often seems a positively Pirandelloish occupation, and in any film worth seeing appearances seem something to look through rather than look at, images in a
metaphorical rather than a literal sense; with
pattern and movement and object chosen and heightened and arranged to make other patterns and movements and objects, not necessarily in a strict and literal sense, so that shadow means menace or a seagull freedom or a toad, as in Bergman, lurks in the innocent, basic, religiously- regarded loaf; but in the broader sense that the director (worth anything, that is) makes the physical world his own, distorts and modifies and transforms till everything is plastic or even fluid in his hands; and landscape or building or object takes on his meaning for it, his intention, the whole shape and purpose of his mind.
Hiroshi Teshigahara, director of Woman of the Dunes and so far unknown to us here, has the idiosyncratic eye it is tempting to call a strongly personal vision, and this, I think, is what mainly makes the film so much more impressive than the novel on which it is based. The book I thought really got silted up in its own sandy symbolism; the film, keeping fairly closely to the story, brings it visually so much alive that one is physically involved, almost overwhelmed. Close-up has always given us a magnified view of things; this film goes further and gives us a microscopic view that makes it impossible to tell whether we are watching a heap of sand br a mountain-side, a human flank or a fingernail. Space is shuffled, expanded and contracted as time is in (say) Resnais. We spend the film in a sand-pit that is sometimes monstrously enormous. There are landslides and prehistoric-looking rumbles, changes in the structure of a landscape that may be on a tray of sand. Yet it doesn't seem like trickery or gimmicks, it seems legitimately sug- gestive: the world is small, the mind is big, free- dom is within one, size means nothing, etc. etc. Those etceteras are not ironically intended, but just indicate the innumerable thoughts that rise in the mind when your nose is an inch away from something as melancholy, monotonous and splendid as sand. Feelings and impulses, perhaps, rather than thoughts.
_ The film's story is odd, but not half as dis- concerting as it might have been, treated other- wise. Because one is sandily involved from the start, feeling it on one's skin, in one's hair, which is just as it should be. A city teacher looking for bugs misses the last bus home and is offered a bed for the night by one of the villagers. In the dark he climbs down a rope ladder to a house on the dunes; in the morning the ladder has gone and he finds he is in a kind of sand bowl, the sides of which are constantly slipping down towards the middle. A woman lives down there, and as her husband and child have been buried in a fall of sand she can no longer manage all the work in- volved in keeping her house free of it. Since the eventual safety of the village depends on this, the villagers have found her a 'helper.' Seven years later the police archives declare him offi- cially missing. When the rope ladder is finally forgotten and left swinging on the side of the pit, he doesn't want it. There are experiments and bugs down there and, of course, the woman; above all there is the chance (if he wants it) of freedom —which means he doesn't want it. A circular theme and argument.
It makes a powerfully peculiar film, and one is hypnotised, and sometimes lulled, by the inter- play of flesh and landscape, the drifting and slid- ing of sand, by a sort of sonorous weirdness. Some of it is slow, some of it comes near to
parodying itself (but the subtitles aren't helpful and Japanese mannerisms are still, after so much filmgoing, a little hard to take), occasionally one nods; but it lingers in the mind, or rather in the senses, grainy and disturbing.
You cannot really make a biography of some- one still alive, and it says a good deal for Jack Le Vien's A King's Story (director: Harry Booth), based on the memoirs of the Duke of Windsor, that it manages to avoid almost entirely the triviality, archness and forelock-pulling one might have expected. In fact it is good, even very good, as far as it goes. That isn't, admittedly, very far, for it says little that isn't already known and skates with understandable discretion over much one would have liked to know more about. But it is tactful and tasteful, includes a good deal of interesting material, particularly about the Duke of Windsor's early life, and has done particularly well with its voices—Orson Welles does the commentary, and his rich, sympathetic, voice, never unctuous, always manly and straight- forward-sounding, yet with all kinds of subtle humours and undertones about it, is the perfect choice, for one believes what he says, and concurs almost effortlessly in, his judgments; and Flora Robson's voice as Queen Mary's brings across powerfully the elderly stiffness and equally the elderly kindness. The Duke appears as he is now, looking, as always, strangely placeless and class- less; even his voice is rather mid-Atlantic, and noticed one definite Americanism of phrase and one American pronunciation. The Duchess appears as well, both then and now, with almost incredibly little difference to mark the passing of thirty years; my neighbour murmured that her voice was just like Jean Arthur's, that famous gravelly croak.
The film is more reticent than the memoirs were on, for instance, the Duke's relations with his parents and the frequent bleakness of his childhood; but it succeeds far better than they did (not surprisingly, perhaps) in putting across his personality as a young man, and, through his letters, in getting something of his voice and way of feeling : a letter to his father, during the first world war, bravely (against his father's opposi- tion) and attractively defends his refusal to wear his own medals when decorating others, because he is so ashamed to wear what he hasn't won on active service. And Queen Mary is worried about Whether, in all the rush of life at Dartmouth, he has time to clean his teeth. Politics are not treated deeply; nor, indeed, is the rest of the story. But in its pleasant dignified way it makes about as much of the surface of the story as could be made.
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