Surprisingly warm and inviting - Ur in for a treat ;-)

DVDs:

	• Warm Water Under a Red Bridge Kôji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu Home Vision Entertainment, 2003 average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Surprisingly warm and inviting - Ur in for a treat ;-)

Fun movie with a delightful premise and pretty heroine with a weak bladder. As an analogy for societies underlying supressive and pious attitudes about creative copulatory co-options it speaks volumes. Based on an old Asian mythology about the joyous release of inner inhibitions & muscle control and how said personal development attracts the bounty of the Law of Attraction.
Without calling personal theology into question, the director leans towards a revealing of the characters "do under others as you would have under yourself" motivations. He can't stop looking, wondering and wanting the warm wet waterful wonderment of her quiet cautionary secret.
A tale of 3 fish - one out of water, one pregnant with water and the others enjoying the water.

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Pure Water

Along with Oshima Nagisa and Shinoda Masahiro, Imamura Shohei is considered to be one of the main promulgators of Japanese New Wave cinema of the 1960s. However, unlike the politically charged cerebral modernist/post-modernist films of Oshima and the ever varying films of Shinoda, Imamura is often considered to be the most humanist of the New Wave directors and instead of embracing the ideals of urbanite revolutionaries he turned to the poor, rural citizens who, steeped in their folk traditions, supposedly contain untarnished souls without influence of modernity and the West, i.e. America. Although many of Imamura's later films take place in the city, their characters often leave the world of materialism and convenience in order to come closer to nature and there true selves. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001), Imamura's last full length feature film, holds to this tradition.

Sasano Yosuke is an out of work architect who spends his days going to job interviews while grimacing when his demanding wife asks him to send money and whether or not he has found a new job so that she and their son can return from her family home in Tokyo. Quite unmotivated in finding a new job, Sasano spends quite a bit of his time with a homeless man called Philosopher Taro whose shanty home is filled with scholarly works. Unfortunately for Yosuke, Taro passes away, but before passing away, Taro informs Yosuke that he stole a golden buddha statue from Kyoto and hid it in a small town called Noto. Not having much else to do, Yosuke goes to Noto and, while buying a cheap lunch, notices an attractive woman, Shimizu Misa, stealing some cheese. Walking over to the spot where she had been standing, Yosuke finds a golden earring in a puddle of "water." He follows the woman back to her home and after eating a bit of cheese, the woman comes on strongly and the two make love which results in the woman's inner "waters" to spurt forth like geysers. Yosuke soon learns that water builds up in the woman and that stealing trinkets and cheese helps her relieve the pressure. Not wanting her to steal again, Yosuke becomes her man to help relieve her of her water, but as the woman's waters begin to run dry, will Yosuke's affections remain as strong?

Never one to shy away from sexual themes, viewers new to Imamura might be surprised to learn that the director was in his mid-seventies when he created this sexy little film. However, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is in no way a sleazy film, and the sex scenes are quite mild and entertaining instead of steaming and titillating. As with many of his other films, such as The Eel and The Pornographers, Warm Water is threaded through with magical realism and the film's quirkiness is quite entertaining although some might find the whole of the film to be a bit patchy. While not one of Imamura's best films, Warm Water does ask the viewer to delve into libidinal delights before they get old and their waters dry up, so the film might be a bit much for some, but for others it makes for an entertaining two hours.

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Sweet, cute at times, and bizarre under it all

Yosuke is a crumbling salaryman - but not really, since the salary isn't coming in any more. In a culture of lifetime employment, mid-career changes are difficult if not actually disreputable, so there's pressure to get a new job, any job. Hoping to find better chances outside of Tokyo, he lands in a fishing village, with a half-believed story of hidden treasure. What he finds instead is cute Saeko, wearing a long loose skirt (there's a reason for that). She's stealing something insignificant from a store, and standing in a puddle on the store's otherwise dry floor.

Obsessed, he hunts her down. When he finds her, she grabs him and makes love right there, with completely unexpected outcome. She has this little problem, you see, and can only relieve it by doing something naughty - like stealing, or ravishing a surprised stranger. Relief comes in the form of a magical "venting" of water, gallons of it, jets of it, and not one of the usual human excreta. She finds him extremely relieving and, in a charming twist, her outpouring turns out to match a kinky side that Yosuke didn't even know he had.

It's pretty silly, and the sexual themes never cross over to real eroticism (unless you share a kink with Yosuke). The story, such as it is, wanders rather aimlessly between an African student on an athletic scholarship, a street thug, a fishing boat, and a sweet young woman with a little problem. In the end, it's a problem they kind of like.

-- wiredweird

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Moist, Never Soggy

It's every bit as bawdy as most of his fictional movies, but Imamura's last full-length feature eschews most of the tragedy and struggle of his more straightforward dramas. Instead, a greater emphasis is placed on the libidinous humor so characteristic of the great director's output. The surrealism imbued in "The Eel" is even more prominent here, and it's used both as a means to amplify one of Imamura's primary subjects of interest (sex) and to conjoin all of the disparate elements and numerous themes of an ingenious mystery and a very unconventional love story.

Both cast and crew will be familiar to anyone who's seen more than a couple of Imamura's films. Yakusho and Shimizu have been professionally acquainted in numerous projects other than "The Eel," and Baisho has been a fine mainstay in almost all of Imamura's films since her role in "Vengeance Is Mine." Shinichiro Ikebe has also scored most of Imamura's movies since then, and his particularly goofy, bouncy score suits the oddities of this movie quite nicely.

While most of the story's innovations are to be credited to Yo Henmi, who wrote the novel from which this was adapted, the screenplay was undoubtedly tweaked to facilitate the quirky idiosyncrasies of an Imamura film. Written by Imamura and his "Eel" collaborators (his son, director Daisuke Tengan and Motofumi Tomikawa), the script is an unbalanced, charming mixture of humor and melodrama. Not all of the dramatic sequences are entirely convincing and the last ten minutes feel quite rushed, but overall, "Warm Water" is satisfying in a way that defies typical closure.

Despite his advanced age during the shooting of this film, Imamura's technique is as impressive here as it ever was. The drifting pans and bouncy, boat-mounted tracking shots feel natural and familiar, but they're the result of fastidious, carefully considered framing. By the end of his career, Imamura finally developed a style that defied the criticism leveled at him by both his detractors and himself.

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Excellent drama with a twist...

An unemployed architect hears a strange story about treasure from a bum on the street, having nothing better to do he delves into the mysterious story and goes to explore the village where the treasure is.
At the village he meets up with an unusual woman who lives in the house where the treasure is supposedly located. The movie deals with growing old, changing relationships, life changes, love, silly things. The subtitles are excellent as is the quality of the dvd.
119 minutes of excellent drama with a little quirky humor thrown in...well done by a famous director, Shohei Imamura. Very deserving of the international praise it received.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

From legendary filmmaker Shohei Imamura comes this comic fable for adults. A frustrated unemployed architect learns of a treasure hidden inside an old house near a red bridge in a remote fishing village. Upon arriving he encounters a beautiful young woman with an unusual condition who lives with her grandmother in the old house. The relationship that builds between them becomes both vital and volatile. In Japanese with English subtitles

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