De l'eau tiède sous un pont rouge

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge directed by the prolific Shohei Imamura follows the life of Yosuke Sasano played by Koji Yakusho. The film has many rich layers and mythic qualities. After losing his job, Yosuke seeks advice from a vagrant wise man name Taro, played by Kazuo Kitamura. Taro ultimately sends Yosuke on a quest to find a hidden golden budda statue. Itfs not so much the statue thatfs important we learn when Yosuke travels to a small fishing village to a house beside the red bridge where we meet Saeko Aizawa who befriends Yosuke to releases her body of water from her very strange condition.

The filling water in Saeko body symbolizes her loneliness and her heaviness of heart to find someone in her life. The gag where Yosuke relieves Seikofs water is fun the first time but soon becomes repetitive. The characters in the story are disjointed from each other but this is not nessearly a bad thing since Imamura has so much to show us. For instance there is a subplot involving an African marathon runner which is used clearly for comic relief but and has nothing to do with the rest of the story. But its characters like this that adds multiple dimensions to the story that really make it memorable.

One thing that confused me was that there was a scene of Saeko almost drowned in the river when she was small and it makes audience imagine that it was probably the cause of flood in her body. However, in the end of the movie we will know that her grandma also had the same sexual predisposition contradicting the river scene.

Overall the film is worth watching for the quirkiness of the characters. A man who just lost his job, homeless people, fishermen, a senile old lady, an African marathon runner, there are a lot of unique characters in this movie. They are people at the bottom of the Japanese social pyramid and something we usually do not see in the movie. The story is a kind of silly, erotic, and funny. Although not a perfect film the fountain spewing sex scenes will be remembered for a long time.

Imamura does here what Neil Jordan does in Crying Game; he takes two seemingly incongruous elements, fetishistic sexual obsession and contemporary socio-political malaise, and weaves them effortlessly together. Imamura's rigorously geometric framing contrasts with the feathery- light content of the tale. Having said that, there are some gritty moments here; a drowning born of insanity is rendered in stark black-and-white, and the social plight of Japan's cast-aside middle-aged salarymen is emblematically captured in Yakusho's performance. However, at heart this is a fun movie that surprises and delights. It is all about the mise-en-scene, perfectly delivered each time by Imamura and the principles. The film does flag at the end; it felt like they opted to go for melodrama purely because the allotted time was running out. The previous two acts make up for that third-act missed beat. One gripe is that the edition I bought had no Extras apart from the theatrical trailer. I would have liked a Making Of to confirm my suspicion that this film was as much fun to make as it is to watch. It must have been murder for cast and crew to keep a straight face during those venting scenes...

I was eager to see WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE - from the description on the back of the DVD I wasn't really expecting this to be THE EEL or BLACK RAIN but if it's junk, it is very well-crafted junk. The story (well commented upon below) is quirky/kinky and provocative, which is well-handled, and a few scenes were hilarious. The cinematography is beautiful - Imamura's films always have a very striking look, and on this front this film doesn't disappoint. WARM WATER... has a strong 'magic realist' quality - more than anything it reminded me a bit of some of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' novels (if only Imamura had stuck in a failed insurgency or a grandmother floating into the sky). I didn't always know what to make of it - the mix of realism, quirkiness, kink, cuteness, humor, small-town mundanity and erotic strangeness all taken at once made me wonder what if anything Imamura might be trying to say (aside from the fact that reality can be strange and life doesn't fit so neatly into compartments). So - no masterpiece, but fans of Imamura won't want to miss it.

It's sad to know there will be no more new Imamura films. I think the previous reviewer is probably lacking a sense of fun. This isn't drivel; it's wicked fun. In the same way he dissects small-town vs. big-city attitudes in "The Eel," Imamura shows us how disconnected from real life the corporate world of Tokyo can make a man by thrusting him into the chaos of joblessness where everything he knows is useless. This is an opportunity to see the ever-hot Koji Yakusho at his James Stewart/Buster Keatonesque best in a story that's worthy of García-Márquez, for its utterly plausible mix of the other-worldly with the down-to-earth. I gave it a 9 out of 10 because Imamura seems to be mystified enough by women that he doesn't flesh out their characters as much as they might deserve, but the mystification is part of the story in this case. Great score, too!

In many ways this is a distinctively Imamura's film. It contains many of the themes characteristic of his oeuvre: His obsession with sex, women and Japanese mythology. WWURB's story somehow mirrors Unagi. The main character of both films, a salariman, for different reasons end up leaving the city for the countryside and establish a relationship with strange women and with the peculiar villagers. But these similarities can also be applied to any of his other films. With a persistent disregard for a clear and logical narrative, many of his films amount to anecdotes and observations made by the characters, some of them appearing and disappearing inexplicably. Take as example the Insect Woman or The Pornographers in the 60s or the historical films Zegen and Eijanaika that he made in the 80s. Imamura has portrayed sex, in most of his films, as something positive even beneficial and in several ones he has acknowledged incest (Insect Woman, The Pornographers and The Profound Desired of the Gods) as part of traditional rural Japan without criticising it. In WWURB Taro (Kitamura Kazuo), the homeless who Yosuke (Yakusho Koji), recently unemployed, befriends seems to be Imamura's alter ego. He advises Yosuke to have sex as much as he can as long as he can keep his instrument up and explains of the beneficial (physically and mentally) qualities of sex and its importance throughout the history of humanity. Sex is closely linked with nature and being suggested as the main essence of life. The film also points to the power of women, so the enormous amount of water produced by Saeko (Shimizu Misa), when having sex with Yosuke, that falls in the river seems to be so rich that attracts fish and seagulls. Saeko's body fluids can also the solution for the purification of the contaminated river. An attempt to cure the river was made by her mother, the village's shaman but was ostracised by the villagers for her use of unscientific methods. Eventually she drowned in the river when trying to perform a ritual. Saeko's grandmother Mitsu (Mitsuko Baisho) seems to possess some sort of clairvoyant power. The conflict between, and eventual loss of, ancestral beliefs (pre-Shinto and pre-Buddhist culture) and modern Japan is also another important characteristic of Imamura's work. In early Japan women, as some were actually shamans, took an active role in religious, social and political matters. Things changed with the advent of Buddhism (religion) and Confucianism (politics and social ethics).

Yosuke is warned by some villagers that he will dry up and lose his vital essence if he keeps on having his sexual encounters with Saeko. He is an outsider from modern Japan, Tokyo, who gets involved with women that represent primitive Japan, a Japan of sexual freedom, finally accepting their customs and beliefs. As Taro tells Yosuke "Drown yourself in a woman's arms, be faithful to your desires without worrying about daily cares." In this sense he is like Kariya, an engineer from Tokyo, who goes to Kurage, a Southern island of Japan, in "The Profound 'Desire' of the Gods". He is believed to be a "god from overseas" by the island's community. After showing little concern for local customs and traditions he marries Toriko, a retarded young woman who epitomised primitive Japan, all sexual freedom, and sister of the island's shaman. So WWURB is certainly a charming, sometimes funny, sometimes kinky film but that lacks the power, challenge and innovation of Imamura's previous films. Certainly the ones made before Black Rain (Kuroi Ame). Still it is worth pointing out that the issue of sex doesn't seem to be a major concern for younger Japanese filmmakers with the exception of Miike Takashi (with his special way of dealing with the subject) and I cannot remember of any sex scene in any of the films I have seen by these directors.