Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu

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DIRECTED BY: Shôhei Imamura

FEATURING: Kôji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu, Kazuo Kitamura

PLOT: An unemployed salesman intends to steal hidden treasure from a confectionary shop, but complications arise when he falls for the elderly owner’s caretaker, a woman with a unique condition.

COMMENTS: Sasano is already down on his luck when his only friend, Taro, passes away. The architectural firm he worked for has folded, leaving him unemployed, and his wife only calls to insult him while demanding his unemployment check. Taro, known as the “Philosopher,” lived as a hobo in a tent filled with rare books, but he was the only person to treat Sasano with respect and to offer him advice gleaned over the course of a misspent life.

Taro once told Sasano of a buried treasure, secreted in a pot, in a house with a view of a red bridge, in a summer resort town on the Sea of Japan. At an impromptu funerary meal held in his honor, Sasano mentions Taro’s claim to this improbable treasure. His hobo companions laugh it off; Taro told the rest of them about it, too. But after a series of unpromising job interviews, Sasano decides to leave Tokyo for the seaside, in search of Taro’s supposed pot of gold.

Arriving in the off season, Sasano stands out as an unlikely tourist. He locates the red bridge, and the house, which Taro had worried wouldn’t still be standing. Sasano spies a woman leaving the building and tails her to the grocery store. There, he catches her stealing cheese while awkwardly standing in a puddle of water. A dropped earring gives him an excuse to follow her back home. She hesitantly welcomes him in, then their chance meeting rapidly becomes a rather. . . aqueous sexual encounter.

Saeko, as she reluctantly explains, suffers from too much “water,” and when it overflows, she’s driven to commit crimes like petty theft. Thoroughly shocked by the whole thing, Sasano hypocritically reproaches her for stealing, while the relationship provides him convenient opportunities for him to search the house for Taro’s treasure.

As Sasano spends more time in the town and comes to know its quirky residents, the story heads in a predictable direction; but its tale of two unlikely romances is tinged with metaphysical symbolism surrounding the element of water. In one scene, Saeko takes Sasano to meet a nuclear physicist who studies neutrinos. He explains to them how the particles have to be shot through “superpure water” in order for their experiments to work. The town’s pure water also provides the key ingredient to making the perfect sweet cakes, though as Saeko eventually reveals to Sasano, their river was once dangerously polluted with cadmium.

Director Imamura’s enduring interest in the connection between human beings and their environment, as well as his explorations into the influence of crime and nonconformity on Japanese society, surface here again, in his final film. The flights of philosophical fancy lead into brief moments of CGI-animated imagery, but most of the scenes remain rooted more or less firmly in reality. Ultimately, Warm Water makes for a slightly kinky but heart-warming tale of how to find purpose, meaning, and happiness in life, along with sex without shame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…combines fish out of water stories with a weird metaphor for female sexuality in this sweetly quirky film which never quite gels.”–Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge [Blu-ray]

• Region A Blu-ray

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