WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
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Page Not FoundWE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together. |
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Page Not FoundWE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
China’s human rights abuses are getting worse.
What’s really driving Bush's crusade against Saddam Hussein?
How Arafat survives political and military attacks.
Fischer leads Schröder to victory in Germany.
The Battle of La Sierra
Bringing back the good ol’ days in San Luis, Colorado.
Plus: The author of The Milagro Beanfield War.
Action, inaction, reaction.
Back Talk
Good news in Florida.
Crude Maneuvers
The race for Iraqi oil is on.
The Pentagon’s blinding lasers.
Insider Radio
At NAB convention, consolidation was a done deal.
Fear and toking in Las Vegas.
Behind the News
In Person: Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley
The Long and Winding March
BOOKS: What happened to the Tiananmen generation?
MUSIC: Steve Earle goes to Jerusalem.
FILM: Warm Water under a Red Bridge.
Aaron’s Way
The Boondocks creates controversy on the comics page.
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September 27, 2002
Oceans o' Lovin'
 hohei Imamura, Japanese director of the vigorous new sex comedy Warm Water under a Red Bridge, has irreverence coursing in his blood even as he enters his fifth decade of moviemaking. There’s a fabulous anecdote from his days as a young (and by all accounts unhappy) apprentice to the august maestro Yasujiro Ozu. The project was Tokyo Story, that most exquisite treatise on family loss; Imamura, whose own mother had just died of a similar brain aneurysm, became overwhelmed and fled the dubbing studio for a toilet stall. Ozu followed him in. Sidling next him to urinate, Ozu turned crisply and asked if he had gotten it right.
He had, of course, and so would Imamura during his career, but never in the same refined manner. We still don’t know what to make of Imamura’s naughty generation—which also included the agitator Nagisa Oshima as well as stylish provocateurs like Seijun Suzuki—and their radical break from the standing orthodoxy of serene tatami-level observations. They swapped Kurosawa’s dignified violence, so palatable to the Western tastes on which it was partly modeled, for festival notoriety and relative obscurity. But today’s young directors would almost certainly be better served by grappling with the New Wave’s humid, problematized responses rather than another ticket to Seven Samurai. Warm Water under a Red Bridge is Imamura’s 20th feature, his second after a brief “retirement” that fortunately lasted only a year before the release of 1998’s Dr. Akagi. Both films have the relaxed signature of a man stretching out after a day’s work; both are set in picturesque fishing villages home to briny codgers and salty youths alike. But a perversely comic spirit bubbles underneath—quite literally in this new one, which takes its name from the torrential vaginal discharges (yup) of one of its more winsome residents, Saeko (a deftly alluring Misa Shimizu). The girl can’t help it: She even leaves puddles behind in the grocery store. Rushing home, she achieves explosive orgasms that spray her walls, ceilings and sexual partners. Imamura has never been afraid of sex or nudity; such was the key to his critical assault on the myth of kimono-wrapped chastity perpetuated by Japan’s “official” cultural exporters. Indeed, watching his lusty couplings in the context of so many sweetly demurring geishas, you’d think he’d invented it. (An earlier Imamura exposé, The Pornographers, jives on the same sense of roguish honor that Boogie Nights would explore, less daringly, some 30 years later.) Sex—its consummation as well as voyeuristic consumption—is not just a reality in the Imamura universe, it’s good for the local economy: Saeko’s plenitude drains into the canal where schools of fish are seen gathering. Sexual release arrives in the form of newly sacked salaryman Yosuke, played by Japan’s leading male sufferer, Koji Yakusho (Cure, Imamura’s own The Eel). After initially coming to town in search of a valuable gold sculpture hidden in Saeko’s house, he quickly reblooms, settling into a stimulating routine of early-morning employment on a commercial fishing boat, followed by afternoon watersports in the bedroom. This is obviously preferable to the withering dismissals coming from his estranged wife via cellphone (“You’re a perpetual loser”); he soon tosses this last link off the pier. Yosuke’s escape into well-lubricated bliss with Saeko has the playful tenor of an idyllic summer vacation; the couple’s surreal escapades are well-complimented by Shinichiro Ikebe’s loopy score, and the gulls drawn to their juices are like cartoon squiggles over writhing bodies. Imamura has indulged in fancy before, but never so boldly and with such sunny engagement. (Warm Water is the tonal opposite of his icily detached masterpiece Vengeance Is Mine, also about a great escape but one into the slippery capriciousness of a mind set on random killing.) Perhaps it’s all a bit too dreamy; you begin to yearn for a complicating factor to materialize out of the warnings of Yosuke’s crewmates about Saeko’s past lover and his decent into madness. And a crisis does come, but with such quiet understatement it’s possible to leave the theater mystified. Saeko’s watery effusions diminish to a trickle. Jealousies and bruised feelings emerge. Was it all just the great sex? Imamura has saved reality for his bitter trump card; when he plays it, the full force of his hand is undeniable.
Warm Water’s Yosuke—in his transformation from corporate casualty to fisherman, sexual pressure valve and unconditional lover—has his precedent in Imamura’s The Insect Woman, which traces a young woman’s triumph over 40 years of hardship as a maid, mother, widow, labor organizer and madam. There’s little judgment here, only the test of survival, pass or fail. This may be the ultimate Imamurian legacy: an acceptance, even accommodation, of life’s brutality. Judging from Imamura’s own surly apprentice, the prolific and disturbingly amoral Takashi Miike, he may actually be onto something. (Miike’s savage Audition deserves reappraisal in this light: one hour of Ozu-worthy tranquillity counterpoised against one hour of blinding barbarity.) If there is still honor in being named “the most Japanese of Japanese directors” as was Ozu, it might be time to pass the mantle. Joshua Rothkopf can be reached at rothkopf@inthesetimes.com. Return to top of the page. |
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WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
hen we think of Ozu’s eternal humanism or Kenji Mizoguchi’s angelic mother-martyrs redeemed by sacrifice, a national character begins to take shape, even if only defined by honorable aspirations and beautiful lies. It might best be called perseverance, as resonant an ideal to postwar Japan as it was—and still is—to those in need of healing around the globe. Imamura’s work extends that hope to the pimps and call girls, the two-bit hustlers and perpetual losers. But more importantly, his films reflect the modernization of that identity into a far more practical notion of adaptability, of survival through mutability. (Adaptability is the key to unpacking the phantasmagoric density of Spirited Away, Japan’s biggest smash and not for nothing.)
