A SCENE AT THE SEA

Japan, 1991, 101 mins. 35mm print source: Celluloid Dreams (Paris, France). Written, directed and edited by Takeshi Kitano. Produced by Masayuki Mori and Takio Yoshida. Original Music by Joe Hisaishi. Photographed by Katsumi Yanagishima. Principal Cast: Kuroudo Maki (as Shigeru), Hiroko Oshima (Takako), Sabu Kawahara (Takoh), Nenzo Fujiwara (Nakajima).




Excerpt from a review by Tony Rayns for Sight & Sound (British Film Institute), April, 1999:

Kitano's third film as director-the first in which he didn't appear as an actor and the first on which he took an editing credit is one of the most idiosyncratic commercial features of the 90s and by any standards in the world remarkable. Its vanishingly simple storyline and visual restraint represent a retreat into order from the messy complexities of the previous year's Boiling Point. But the conjunction of a minimal narrative and a narrowly focused vision produces a 'miniature' with huge emotional and even philosophical resonance. It also happens to be one of the least patronizing and sentimental films ever made about people living with handicaps.

At heart, A Scene at the Sea is a fable about self-improvement through sheer persistence. Like Masaki in Boiling Point, Shigeru is on the very lowest rung of Japanese society: a deaf-mute in a thankless casual job, minimally educated and without prospects. Teaching himself to surf is his way of taking arms against a sea of troubles, an essentially solitary and physical response to his circumstantial exclusion from the success story of Japan Inc. And although he can swim, he has no 'natural' aptitude for the sport; it's his tireless readiness to go back and try yet again which impresses the pro surfer Nakajima enough to start equipping and coaching him.

Kitano characteristically contrasts Shigeru's halting progress with other young men's efforts to get into surfing: one is an inept rich kid in an especially lurid wet-suit, whose bored girlfriend tries to strike up a friendship with Shigeru; others are the two footballers who jointly buy a cheap, second-hand surfboard (rejected by Shigeru himself) and then spend more time squabbling over turns to use it than they do in the sea.

As a fable, this is the precise converse of the later Kids Return—a connection cemented by the deliberate similarities between Joe Hisaishi's scores for the two films. More likely accidental than intended, Shigeru's off-screen death (like the suicides of several Kitano protagonists) provides a general closure, not only ending the narrative but also giving existential meaning and point to the character's modest achievements by terminating them. The two central boys in Kids Return lack Shigeru's will and persistence; they achieve nothing but defeats and humiliations, and wind upalive—exactly where they started.

Dying young, Shigeru checks out with his justified self-respect intact. He was dealt a bum hand, but won the game anyway; he probably wouldn't have gone on to win the match, but his death renders the issue academic. The film's emphasis on seascapes (the very first shot is Shigeru's point of view of the glittering sea through the windshield of the garbage truck) keeps this unassuming human drama in perspective. Kitano's fixation on the sea, no doubt the future subject of many graduate theses, underscores Shigeru's inevitably doomed attempt to master the waves; the sea here is the conceptual opposite of the stylized urban backdrop in Kids Return.

Kitano tells the story in images of startling simplicity, modulated by editing rhythms as distinctive as Detective Azuma's gait in Violent Cop. The great majority of shots are fixed-frame compositions (the only camera movements are lateral tracking shots following motion within the frame), which, taken with the frequent absence of dialogue, give the film the visual 'purity' Kitano's French fans are pleased to call "trés zen". But Kitano is far more engrossed by the profane than the sacred, and he obviously enjoys the low-ish humour of observing petty human achievements and failures with a deadpan detachment that seems so overtly thoughtful. Still, it's the 'formalism'—the liking for frontal, tableau—style compositions and editing just slightly out of synch with audience expectations—which makes Kitano's work so distinctive and generates the feeling that more is going on than meets the eye.