This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the London Film Festival.
A film of love, life and death on
the island of Amami, south of the Japanese mainland, Still the Water attempts
to represent the traditions of a small island community as two children come to
terms with death.
The film follows Kyoko (Jun
Yoshinaga) and Kaito (Nijiro Murakami) as they both come face-to-face with
death. Kyoko falls in love with the moody Kaito, who is significantly less
mature than she is. Kaito’s parents have divorced and neither seems to spend
much time with Kaito, who suffers in silence. Meanwhile, Kyoko is trying to
come to terms with her dying mother. Then Kaito finds a corpse floating in the
sea.
The film has a real human warmth
to it, and there are many scenes that manage to convey some universal truths
about life and death and our inability to fully grasp these big questions. The
main problem with the film is that its success or failure may depend on the
degree of one’s sympathy for films that juxtapose the permanence of nature with
the human struggles playing out in its midst. In this respect, the film is much
too long and somewhat conventional for its own good. A more experimental or
vibrant film might have better represented these themes more successfully than
a lot of sober looks into the middle distance followed by shots of wind blowing
through foliage. Oftentimes it feels cold and intellectual when it should be
emotional and the graphic goat slaughtering scenes seem to paradoxically
suggest that the kind of natural grace the film represents is only open to
humans. Similarly, the film’s triumphant ending, thanks to a judicious use of
blur, seems to unintentionally suggest that an embrace of nature should only go
so far.
The film ends with a typhoon, which both threatens to
engulf the humans or bring some sort of clarity, but the film remains somewhat
vague. The character’s emotional journeys are clearly mapped out (almost too
precisely) but we are left with a feeling that we have not learnt anything we
didn’t know before. One death scene is presented lyrically and rather movingly,
but only because it totally ignores the pain and the discomfort of the act of
dying. It is a warm film, but it feels only surface deep – a film betraying the
influence of Malick, Herzog, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi but few ideas of its own.
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