Cheap Warm Water Under A Red Bridge (DVD) (Kôji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu) (Shohei Imamura) Price

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Customer Reviews of Warm Water Under A Red Bridge

An uneven movie with an interesting story
Not having any luck finding a job in Tokyo, an unemployed salesman named Yosuke promises an old, dying friend that he will claim a hidden treasure for him; a golden statue of Buddha. Yosuke travels to a small, seaside town and finds a house where the statue is supposedly hidden. Before he can step inside, he spies a young woman hurrying from the house located beside a red bridge and for some reason, follows her to the market. There, he watches her shoplift some cheese while she stands in a puddle of water.

When the two eventually meet, he learns of her secret affliction: that she fills with water. The only way to release the water is through sexual release. Soon, Yosuke abandons his treasure hunt, finds a job as a fisherman and sees more and more of the young woman.

I admit that I thought this an intriging story. A woman who fills with water and can only release it through sex. A great idea. But, this movie confused me. I didn't know if I were watching a comedy or a drama. It starts of very heavy, with the state of unemployment, Yosuke's wife who nags and demeans, the death of Yosuke's friend. but when Yosuke and the young woman have sex for the first time and the water bursts out, this funky Japanese music starts playing, giving the impression of a bad 1970s soft-core movie. I started laughing, though a bit self-consciously.

What I really disliked about this movie is that the relationship between Yosuke and the young woman is unbelievable. I felt no chemistry between them. Only later -- much later -- did I discover a real connection with her immediate taking to Yosuke, but it felt like a copout.

While the story has potential and Koji Yakusho gives a fine performance as Yosuke, I can't help but be a little disappointed with the results.

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WATER SPORTS?
WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (Home Vision Entertainment) is a comic fable about an unemployed architect who seeks treasure in a house near a red bridge. In the house, he encounters a woman with a most peculiar condition: she releases torrents of water when she has an orgasm. And much depends on this wellspring. The relationship becomes essential and explosive. Shobei Imamura's mature tale is seductive and confounding. In Japanese with English subtitles.

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The most unexpected and glorious comedy in ages.
A sublimely skewered shaggy-dog sex comedy from Shohei Imamura that takes up where Edward Yang's sober 'Yi-Yi' left off, and pulls it into a completely unexpected direction. Like Yang's film, Imamura's protagonist, Yosuke Sasano, is a computer programmer in crisis (in this case his business has gone under); he now spends his time being insulted by his horrid, hectoring wife on the phone, and living with river-side tramps. Like Yang's film, Imamura diagnoses the spiritual void at the heart of Far Eastern super-corporate economic success - one very Yang-like shot views Yosuke attending an interview from behind a chillingly impersonal window; the distance between viewer and protagonist makes his desperate grovelling to the Kafkaesque manager all the more pathetic - but his prescription couldn't be more different.

Initially, the film seems as methodical and meticulous in composition and tone as we would expect from a severe Oriental master, with complicated, multi-level, multi-frame compositions (the geometry of character groupings imposed on the geometry of place - see the triangle of friends overlooking the corpse in his tent in the opening sequence) staged thoughtfully for a static camera that picks out only the essential elements of each image. This staticness doensn't mean each shot is devoid of internal tension - for instance, the opening tracking long-shot that follows the policemen in the direction of the hut, works against the movement of the river, and is a brilliant, if wrong-footing visual introduction of the film's themes (the disjunction and perversion of the natural in modern life etc.). But even startling comic upsets - such as the collapse of the makeshift roof under which his friends toast the dead man when one of them drunkenly knocks over a beam - doesn't prepare us for the bizarre sidetracks the plot will soon take.

The dead man, Taho, was an ex-con who spent decades in his river hut reading the world's classics; Yosuke shared many hours with him when he was supposed to be looking for jobs, with Taro encouraging him to ditch his cripplingly submissive conformity and search for true love. Just before he died, he told him that he had left a stolen treasure in the house of a former lover in a far-flung seaside town, which he was welcome to take if he could find it. Broke and unemployed, Yosuke sets off, and follows the lady of the house, Saeko, to a local supermarket, where she breaks water and shoplifts. It emerges she has a 'problem' with welling internal water that can only be vented by kleptomania or lovemaking. Yosuke takes a job with the local fisherman's son, and is on call for whenever Saeko needs him. But when he falls for her, is it for herself or the life-giving water which gushes into the adjacent river, attracting all the fish?

Yosuke's journey from the rather glum order of Tokyo to the weird logic of the seaside town is like the move from the Victorian age to Wonderland in Lewis Carroll's famous book. Yosuke wanders the town, populated by eccentrics whose actions seem more determined by whim and desire than the fixed expectations he's used to, like a bemused Alice, in his case being slowly sucked in by the town's seductive call, and suffering some very odd dream sequences. Imamura's tone changes completely - the music becomes circus-like playful, the staging of scenes, the clash between rigorous framing and nutty events, increasingly absurd (see the wonderfully coy **lla**o sequence). This mode undercuts what seems to be a very middle-aged male fantasy - the spiritual regenration through sex of a hen-pecked husband. And when you think about it, the town isn't that much of a haven - racist, riven with small-scale organised crime and the legacy of industrial pollution, and full of visual evidence of economic delapidation. But Imamura's eye for the meaningful image of location with which to frame his dense, ambivalent compositions never wavers, and his sensitivity to labyrinthine interiors, natural light or water (the deflection of dissolving light from the river onto buildings is particularly beautiful) or delicious colour-coding (those reds!) is as true as ever.