Go with
the flow

by Chris Dashiell

Count me among those bored by the usual depiction of sex in films. Whether as a way of advancing a story, developing characters, or just trying to get the audience's attention, sex scenes are usually the weakest and most unnecessary elements in a movie. It's a rare director or writer who finds a fresh approach, or makes connections to other areas of life that have any meaning. Maybe it helps if you're 75 years old, and an eccentric genius like, for instance, Shohei Imamura.

His latest film, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, is an absurdist parody of male ideas about female sexuality - among other things. Imamura is too sly to limit his film to being "about" just one thing - it's unpredictable and deliberately off-kilter, making fun of itself along with everything else.

An unemployed businessman (Koji Yakusho) learns from a dying hermit that there is a golden Buddha that he hid in a house years before, located in a certain fishing village. When the businessman goes in search of the treasure after the hermit's death, he ends up in an affair with a beautiful young woman (Misa Shimizu) who has a very peculiar affliction - her body stores a great deal of water, which is released in a mighty gush whenever she has sex. The man falls in love with her, getting a job with a local fishing boat. When his lover gets too full of water, she signals him from her house, and he runs home as fast as he can to have sex, in which they are both doused with a massive spray from her body, the water then streaming down into the adjoining canal, where it apparently enriches the quality of the water, and attracts crowds of fish.

The description of the bizarre plot doesn't really convey the film's beguiling tone, combining deadpan nonchalance and a sort of romantic wistfulness, interrupted by sudden bouts of comic anarchy. The equation of women, water, and fecundity is pushed to the limit, and then turned upside down so we can see the male insecurities reflected through the myth. Thrown into the mix are the woman's fortune-telling grandmother, a scooter-riding youth who warns the hero about having his vital energy drained, an African student in training for a marathon, and another fortune-seeker who shows up seeking the treasure. If you're expecting jokes, forget it. The humor consists in watching the hero's falsely assuring world of "boring predictability" quietly crumble.

The film is beautifully shot and framed - the director has long been one of the cinema's most visually self- assured artists. Koji Yakusho - who starred in Imamura's last film, The Eel, and is probably best known in the west for his lead role in Shall We Dance? - perfectly conveys his character's mid-life yearning and befuddlement. On the down side, the picture drags in spots - some of the comic ideas are more interesting than others, and the goofy music is laid on a bit thick.

Still, I'd be hard put to name a recent film that was more interesting on the subject of sex. Imamura's attitude is neither purely celebratory, nor (as one might expect from an older person) does he take a stance of bemused detachment. In Warm Water, sex expresses a need for something greater in life, and at the same time for an escape from life. This sense of dissatisfaction with the ordinary and with social convention (the idea that one doesn't need a business career to be happy is a secondary theme) and the resulting tendency towards obsession and addictive behavior, is the source of the film's humor and its melancholy, just as the story's mythical trappings sets the "should be" of our dreams against the "what is" of our reality. Thus the film's unbalanced and unresolved quality is, I think, intended. There are no answers, only questions, and Imamura chooses to laugh while asking them.

The theme of addiction is addressed directly, but by no means conventionally, in Quitting, a new film by Chinese director Zhang Yang, who had success with 1999's rather sentimental Shower. Here's he's discarded the sentimentality in favor of a gritty mixture of naturalism and self-referential theatricality, in this true story of a young Beijing actor (Jia Hongsheng) who resists his family's attempts to rescue him from his drug addiction, and spirals down into near psychosis and a stay in a mental hospital. What makes the film's method unusual is that this is Jia's own story - he plays himself, and almost all the people in the film play themselves as well, including his parents and the patients and doctors at the hospital.

For those accustomed to the "triumph over adversity" approach to recovery stories, the film's technique may seem off-putting, to say the least. The main character is a self-centered, pretentious, and obnoxious young man who treats his parents horribly. Witnessing the bad behavior and enduring the immature thought processes of this spoiled, abusive addict for two hours puts a strain on the viewer. But then, that's part of Zhang's point - there's nothing entertaining about addiction, and a drug addict really is a pain in the ass.

The parents, both provincial actors, move to the city in the belief that they can influence their son for the good, a notion of which they are painfully disabused. The performances here are marvelously understated, the father (Jia Fengsen) especially touching in his attempts to connect to his son, revealing a wide gap between the older generation, largely rural and ignorant of the west, and the post-Mao youth who seek a sense of freedom hinted at through western music, clothes, and ideas. The restless seeking and feelings of inadequacy of this generation are reflected, in an example of rueful comedy, by the lyrics of the Beatles' "Let It Be" (somewhat distorted into a Chinese idiom) recited by Jia and his friends as if it were the ultimate attainment of cosmic wisdom.

In addition to its incisive portrayal of addiction and generational conflict, the film has a fine sense of place. It reveals Beijing as a real city with a complexity that is similar to other urban environments, yet with a personality of its own. But Zhang's technique, I would have to say, is uneven. The film could use more focus - it sprawls and repeats itself. I admire the way the movie puts demands on the audience, much as the main character puts demands on his family, but the picture needs more of an emphasis on what's important, and less attention to the peripheral. Having said that, however, it seems to me that Zhang is going in the right direction as an artist, stretching and trying interesting things.

At a couple of points in the film, the camera pulls back and we realize that we're on a sound stage with a set. It's a startling effect, this acknowledgment that we're watching a reconstruction. It reminded me a little of things that Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf have tried in the Iranian cinema. If nothing else, Quitting is evidence of an increasing sophistication of narrative form that's developing in the international film scene.

After seeing The Two Towers, the second part of Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, I think I have a better understanding of the appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic. This film has more poetry than the first part - some of the speeches, accompanied by expressive montage, convey the Ossianic grandeur of this form of mythic fantasy, and I think also that there's a greater sense of strategic complications with the various movements of armies and other forces on Middle Earth.

I speak as one who has never bothered to read Tolkien. Some friends who have read him complain that the movies don't pay enough attention to the quieter moments and revelations of character, spending too much time on battles, CGI monsters and so forth. I imagine that might be true, although I still find it hard to believe that anyone would have done a better job than Jackson with such unwieldy material.

In any case, I found myself engaged throughout by this installment. It seems less of a series of chases than the first, and more in the nature of an actual story about the relationships between lands and people in a world. Jackson is best when he assumes the faux medieval cadence and tone in all seriousness, and indulges in it for all it's worth. When he tries to make light of things, using John Rhys-Davies as comic relief, or having Orlando Bloom invent the skateboard, it doesn't work as well.

It also became more apparent to me that the need to destroy the ring is a crucial element of Tolkien's ideas about good and evil. This is probably just thickness on my part, but this didn't seem as clear in Part One, maybe because the corruption as portrayed in The Fellowship of the Ring seemed merely personal, whereas in The Two Towers it has a political context, for lack of a better term. Tolkien, it seems, was presenting a kind of critique of the power principle as being inherently evil. Evil is represented as domination and destruction of nature - this is made more explicit in a subplot involving tree-like creatures called Ents. Goodness, then, is the freedom of the natural world, and also of a sense of tradition, as expressed in one of the movie's finer moments, a speech by Sam (Sean Astin) about stories and heroes.

There is still an exhausting quality to a lot of this, a piling on of effects for their own sake, as if Jackson felt he had to overcalculate to guarantee success with the action/cience fiction movie crowd. There's an advantage to having three parts, though. The story can branch out and deepen in nine hours - and I, for one, was entertained and involved on more than just the level of eye candy. Incidentally, the best thing in the picture is Gollum - a strange, incredibly ugly, pitiful creature, amazingly constructed, with a superb creepy voice by Andy Serkis. He just about steals the movie.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene