Still crazy after all these years, Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge premiered in 2001 and would prove to be the Japanese auteur’s final film. Imamura’s oeuvre had spanned 17 features by this point, to say nothing of his television documentaries, but Warm Water is perhaps best appreciated as its own wild animal, divorced from the lurid underworld dramas on which the director forged his international reputation.
The movie is trippy and singular — as eccentrically funny as a good absurdist sitcom, as sexually uninhibited as anything John Waters produced, and as fanciful as a fairy tale, with a stream-of-consciousness inner logic that brims with the unexpected. And it’s a delight to experience this offbeat swan song in a vibrant digital remaster from Film Movement’s Classics imprint ($34.95 Blu-ray, $29.95 DVD).
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge starts like many a Law & Order episode, with the recovery of a body. Taro, a beloved village elder in a seaside town in Japan, has left behind little but the blue tent in which he lived and the library of “difficult books” he kept inside it. But the old man evidently also abandoned a treasure in a nearby town: a gold Buddha statue that promises untold riches for anyone who can recover it.
Hearing of this perhaps mythical cash cow, Taro’s younger friend Yosuke (Koji Yakusho), an unemployed office worker desperate for a cash infusion to support his wife and child, endeavors to follow Taro’s bread crumbs and recover the statue, which apparently resides in a house abloom with trumpet flowers and abutting a red bridge.
All of which is mere preamble to one of filmdom’s most unorthodox meet-cutes. Upon discovering the residence and its fire-engine-red bridge, Yosuke encounters one of its inhabitants, Saeko (Misa Shimizu), in a local supermarket, fidgeting in the dairy aisle and trying her best to look inconspicuous as water streams down her legs and pools at her feet. Following Seako back to the fateful house, Yosuko discovers in the most forthright way the connection between water and Saeko’s libido. And he learns that — because why not? — her strange condition is tied to a kind of kleptomania. When her water reserves fill up — unless she has, let’s say, other ways of releasing her inventory — she needs to steal something. She has a penchant for exotic cheeses.
Other characters come and go in Imamura’s quixotic fable, aligning in his vision like stars in a constellation. There’s a penniless hobo from Yosuke’s hometown who visits him at the house, eager for a lead on the golden Buddha. There’s the rough-and-tumble commercial fisherman who, for reasons that unfurl gradually, hires Yosuke on his trawler. There’s the African marathon runner, always in a full sprint, who suffers racist invectives from the bigoted locals, and who is followed by a bicycle-riding coach prodding him to run ever faster. And there is Saeko’s senile grandmother, who channels “divine” fortunes and transcribes them on rice paper whenever they arrive. She slips one into the hands of Yosuko when they first meet: “Luck cometh.”
To quote a line of dialogue from the screenplay, co-written by Imamura, “many things are somehow all connected.” So it is with Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, whose various threads indeed form a strange but coherent patchwork, anchored by Imamura’s capacious vision. There is room in Warm Water for dream sequences, like the one in which Yasuko finds himself in the cosmos, nestled in a fetal position inside a rainbow vortex, and for flashbacks, like the one exploring the tragic backstory of Saeko’s mother, in stark black-and-white. In a kind of inverted Seventh Seal riff, there’s even a ghostly visitation over a game of chess, in which Taro materializes out of a concrete wall with fresh wisdom to dispense for the conflicted Yosuke.
This overflowing bounty of activity exists in the context of what is unabashedly a romantic comedy, as Yosuke forges a relationship with Saeko despite, or because of, her unusual condition. The sex scenes are presented with a sprightly, loping score that’s aflutter with whimsy. As the water gushes from her nether regions like an aggressive sprinkler system, the sequences are played quite rightly for humor, as a comic allusion to the undine legend.
If there is any criticism to be leveled at Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, it’s that its ambitions can run amok. This is such a disheveled novelty that you may not feel completely satisfied by the ending, with its abrupt postscript. But it’s those sexual encounters that most linger, not because they arouse — far from it — but because of their inherent power dynamic.
Even as recently as the early 2000s, sexuality on camera was still very much a product of the male gaze; one needs only to view Nina Menkes’ revelatory 2022 documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power to understand just how pervasive sex has been conjoined to male supremacy. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, with its exultant approach to the female orgasm, flips this standard on its head.
Saeko uses Yosuke, as it were, to fulfill her needs, offering a perspective on sex-positive feminism that transcends the movie’s occasionally mumbo-jumbo trappings. Imamura clearly didn’t fall back on old sensibilities in his twilight years; he became woker.