Some sex acts can still rouse something rarer than lust. Merriment, for instance. The one in Shohei Imamura's fairly gentle Japanese erotic comedy is certainly new to someone of my wide (cinematic) experience. It brought down the house at Cannes.
You can forgive a film a lot when a moment in it leaves audiences with something to talk about (or joke about).
The hero is a salaryman who's lost his job. (Every Japanese film at Cannes last year featured the newly unemployed; perhaps for quick audience identification in the current recession). Listening to a garrulous old-timer, he's spun a tale of lost riches: a golden Buddha stolen from a Kyoto temple, hidden long ago beside a red bridge near a house on the far-away Noto peninsula - and still there, just waiting for finders.
Yosuke (Koji Yakusho) finds the bridge, the house, and therein the lovely grand-daughter (Misa Shimuzu) of the babbling old crystal-gazer (Mitsuko Baisho) who owns it. The girl has a secret she soon persuades Yosuke to share: her waterworks can only be relieved by sex. The whalers' call "Thar she blows!" springs irresistibly to mind as the couple indulge, and a spout of bodily fluid hits the ceiling, drenching her partner and quenching his lust. He has to hang his kit out to dry and the overflow, so to speak, seeps poetically into the river under the red bridge. The first time this watery eruption occurred, it convulsed us all; after a few more floods, it looked like a plumbing problem rather than a sexual eye-opener.
The film is overlong, but a genuinely bemusing experience for collectors of erotica. Occasionally, too - the diuretic dramas apart - it is disturbing and surreally amusing, as when an Ethiopian long-distance runner, who's chosen Japan to go into training for the Olympics, pads past chased by the local dogs. Racism lives - even in this, er, backwater.
Warm Water Under A Red Bridge
Cert: cert15
