Naomi Kawase 2014 France/Japan
Starring: Nijirô Murakami, Jun Yoshinaga, Miyuki Matsuda, Tetta Sugimoto, Makiko Watanabe
The novelist and director Naomi Kawase is an odd presence in the film world. Not particularly well-regarded or even well-known in her native Japan (viewers and producers alike seem to have little time for her patented blend of pretension and threadbare narratives), her work has only really found an audience in France, the Cannes Film Festival having awarded her plaudits, various prizes and even co-financing for the majority of her output. The reception elsewhere in Europe has been cool, in fact twenty-six years have passed since she made her debut and her latest, Still The Water, is actually her first to have received distribution in the UK. In a break from her usual modesty and self-deprecation Kawase has accompanied the release by calling the film her masterpiece and declaring it worthy of the Palme D'or that has eluded her at past festivals. Unfortunately her style can be something of an acquired taste; she frequently inhabits the gap between fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and reality, and approaches her features with a documentarian's eye, her chief concerns the unpicking of her own litany of family traumas and the exploration of contemporary issues that allow her to reminisce and heal - her output is best described in the titles of her first two short films, 'I focus on that which interests me' and 'The concretization of these things flying around me' (both 1988). In some cases the images she creates can be beautiful, moving, troubling and eerie but occasionally the combinations and comparisons feel ill-fitting. With Still The Water she skirts both lines in the first few minutes, taking in sympathetic slaughter, bumbling nature, seemingly self-aware waves and a soundtrack of jungle drums that feel synthetic until the musicians playing them appear on screen, her camera silently sweeping and surveying, focussing on bystanders we never see again as if they might be future protagonists. In a moment both shocking and tranquil a spider crawls across the lens of the camera, Kawase unashamedly revealing that what we're seeing is fake, challenging our perception of (fictional) reality and testing our patience, the only imposition an outbreak of acting that changes the pace. The setting is Amami Oshima, an island in the Ryukyu archipelago and the birthplace of Kawase's grandmother (although neither she, Kawase herself or any reasonable facsimiles feature in the narrative proper), the gorgeous cinematography and underwater photography care of Yutaka Yamazaki, the performance taking place between the two teenage protagonists, Jun Yoshinaga's charming Kyôko and Nijirô Murakami's moody Kaito. She likes to go swimming in the bay while still in her school uniform, he has a nervous disposition and a belt buckle that pushes its way through his shirt like an erection. Her mother is a dying shaman (a heavy-handed complication but not one that impinges all that much) and her father runs a café. Kaito meanwhile has a largely uninterested, long absent drunkard/tattooist for a father, a mother he regularly argues with and a recurring nightmare (or is it?) of a tattooed man having sex with her. Subtlety, as you may have guessed, isn't Kawase's strong suit but it's hard not to be mesmerised. In the opening moments there's a murder, or at least a tattooed body is washed up on the bay and the death is suspicious. A late revelation (brilliantly acted by the way) reveals just how it connects to the rest of the story. Both leads are excellent in their roles, making an "I love you" scene funnier, sweeter and more joyful than it really deserves to be, but they're laid low again and again by dialogue (or possibly just translation, my Japanese isn't perhaps what it should be) bewildering, banal and not in the least bit profound. To pay it a compliment though it does replicate the realistically dreamy speech of many teenagers coming-of-age. As a whole the film calls to mind the recent work of Terrence Malick, once described to me as "toilet, very pretty toilet but toilet none the less". I don't know that I need say anymore.
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