Impressions...
I was captivated by this film and just want to share some random impressions.
CAUTION, SPOILERS AHEAD!
A circumscribed (literally with sand dunes and sand walls) life. Few superficial distractions. A simple life with one overwhelming purpose: a life dedicated to the welfare of the village as a whole. Individual desires must be set aside in the constant, daily work of preventing the sand from encroaching upon and destroying an entire village. To keep one house safe is to keep all houses safe. The effect of such work has a ripple effect: in one simple dedicated life lies the salvation of many. A life lived simply.
The danger comes from agitation, dissatisfaction, hurry, a desire to be elsewhere. The male character knows (or, at least, suspects) that his life before “captivity” has little purpose or meaning. He longs to be recognized, if only to have his name in a “bug” book for discovering a new kind of insect. His life before was spent in searching, categorizing, and pinning bugs to the mat. And he had a room in the city to go to at the end of his work day, where he lived alone.
He comes to the woman with a barely disguised need to justify his life “before the dunes.” He shows her his bug specimens, naming them proudly, and showing her large, line drawings from a scientific book. She says little (or nothing) and seems barely interested. She is used to her seemingly restricted purpose and has no use for the larger world outside.
Two events in the film stand large in my mind:
The first is when the man knocks a box of beads from the hands of the woman onto the sand floor of her house. The beads are not much larger than the sand grains, but they are of a different quality and they sparkle (with color, although the film is black and white). The man is sorry and begins trying to pick up the beads from the sand, one by one. She tells him not to mind and begins to scoop up handfuls of the bead/sand mixture and places them in a strainer so that the beads will be sifted from the sand.
This is a reminder that valuable things may be gleaned from the most unpromising material, if one has the knowledge and patience to harvest them.
The second event occurs when, after a long time without water, the two characters finally receive a bucketful of water and each drinks it in turn. The man goes first and thrusts his head greedily into the bucket to relieve his thirst. His drinking is an animal’s act of unconscious need. Water is a need, he doesn’t know why and he plunges in without thought and only knows at the end of his drink that a need has been relieved. She, too, in her turn, seems to greedily suck in the water in an automatic, blind fashion. Yet, when she is finished, she pauses, closes her eyes, and seems to savor her awareness of what she has just done.
It seemed to me that once again arose the theme of the larger world being inextricably part of, the same as, the smaller. What are humans, after all, but primarily water beings on a molecular level? When we drink, are we not replacing part of ourselves? Then the drinking becomes a sacred activity. We take ourselves into ourselves not just for survival, but because we cannot be separate from our essence and remain alive for long.
Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.