Reseñas de la crítica

Even by Kawase's own standards, the symbolism plumbs new depths of vapidity... The semi-improvised dialogue, part mumbled banalities and awkward pauses, part quasi-Buddhist homilies about cycles of life, death and regeneration and the spirit of place, is particularly trite.

Kawase's work isn't particularly well-known away from the festival circuit: as far as I'm aware, Still the Water is the first of her films to be given even a limited cinema release in the UK. It's perhaps not quite strong enough to kick-start a Kawase craze, although fans of Hirokazu Kore-eda's tender family dramas should find much to enjoy.

It strains hard to present itself as an rhapsodic, elemental teen love story set against a natural backdrop of the glowing moon, the crashing waves and the shimmering branches. But the final product comes across as crushingly self-conscious, all cute, boil-in-the-bag visual metaphors bemoaning the unpredictability of life and love, and dialogue which comprises of cheap, faux-poetic philosophising.

...All of this would be much more forgivable if Kawase didn't come off as such a half-assed filmmaker. Still the Water represents a return to the control she exhibited in some of her earlier work, and in fact many of the landscape and aquatic shots possess a crispness that harks back to Kawase's days as a video artist. But from scene to scene and shot to shot, there's an egregious lack of commitment: handheld shaky-cam, then master shot, then a poetic interlude, then into classical decoupage.

Translated from the Japanese, the title is The Second Window, which is better than what the festival's going with. It gets at Kawase's themes of rebirth and alternative choices. There really is a worldview here in the pretty, protracted death scene, the typhoon sequence, and the sex that often looks like CPR. She's talking about the release of life and its reclamation and rechanneling.

The film's nominal story involves a terminally ill mother, a corpse found floating in the ocean, and a tentative teen romance; as usual, though, Kawase is mostly interested in having these characters speak her ideas aloud, handing them endless turgid dialogue about nature, death, and the link between the two.

Moving from her native Nara to the semi-tropical island of Amami-Oshima whence her ancestors hail, Kawase embraces nature worship and pompous philosophizing in her indulgently mannerist style, which, over the course of two hours, overwhelms a small yet potentially moving story of two teenagers dealing with separation within their families.

If Still the Water does not top the major works of this Japanese director, it has some remarkable moments, and one in particular that achieves great commotion by filming faces, profiles, in the middle of sadness bursts, and which confirm the sensibility of telling tales about the disseminated frontier between the affection of the living and their death ones.

Perhaps enough of Kawase's pet concerns -- the tension between man and nature, the endurance of cultural ritual, the spiritual ties that bind drifting communities -- are gathered here to mark the new film as typical, but not especially advanced; from its murky digital veneer to its half-formed character network, "Still the Water" is more naïve than it is imperious.