A Scene at the Sea (1991)

Ano natsu, ichiban shizukana umi, Japan, 101 minutes
Director / writer / editor: Takeshi Kitano
Photography: Katsumi Yanagijima
Music: Joe Hisaishi
Cast: Claude Maki, Hiroko Oshima, Sabu Kawahara

For a movie that is so self-consciously about silence, A Scene at the Sea has a notably beautiful soundtrack. Director, writer, and editor Takeshi "Beat" Kitano makes the music an integral part of it. Composer Joe Hisaishi had already established himself with animated films from Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Ponyo, and many others). With A Scene at the Sea he began a fruitful collaboration with Kitano as well (including soundtracks for Sonatine, Fireworks, and Kikujiro). It is moody keyboard synthesizer music in A Scene at the Sea, occasionally reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys, overflowing with emotional tug points but at the same time cool and distant, like the sea vistas themselves that populate this movie so constantly. As much as anything A Scene at the Sea is a movie about watching. We spend a lot of time watching people who are watching other things, as often as not the sea itself.

Formally, it's because the two main characters—Shigeru (Claude Maki) and Takako (Hiroko Oshima)—are deaf, a boyfriend and girlfriend in their 20s who are living in a world with only visual and tactile cues. The music works as a kind of analog of their feelings. Shigeru is a garbage collector who decides one day that he wants to be a surfer. That's the narrative arc and chief point of clarity. Much of the rest of it, including what happens to them in the end, is shrouded or at least obscured by silence. No one has much to say, in other words. Kitano, who can be prone anyway to cinematic stunts inserted like fits of expressive joy, emphasizes the situation by borrowing heavily from the aesthetics of silent film. Title cards could cover all the dialogue in this movie. The way A Scene at the Sea stops and starts and moves sideways and returns again to its through-lines is like nothing so much as Sunrise or Man With a Movie Camera, luxuriating in the simplest pulses of a love story, and even more, in the pure visual.



It's also fair enough to also call A Scene at the Sea a surfing movie, because it does have some exciting scenes of surfing. But you're going to be disappointed if you're hoping for Blue Crush or Step Into Liquid. More often—just plain weirdly—we are watching the people who are watching the surfing. Not from behind, so we can see the surfing too, but square up in front of them in medium-long, as they lounge on the sand, laugh at silly mistakes, and gasp and sigh over well-executed surfing. These people, this group of five or six or seven, changes all the time, though some are more persistent. They are like reflecting images of us, watching.

As Shigeru hones his skill, advancing from being an object of their ridicule to sincere respect for his work ethic and abilities, he and Takako eventually become members of the group of watchers. They don't participate in the chatter of course. That's not their way. They have sign language but are rarely seen using it. They seem to live almost unnaturally within themselves, nurturing profound opaque unknowable connections to silence and the sea and each other. What at first seems like a surfing movie, and then maybe something more kooky and offbeat, finally reveals itself as a love story, and a very moving one.

But even there it is maddeningly slippery. The relationship between Shigeru and Takako is not easy to understand. It's not even clear at first that they are boyfriend and girlfriend. He seems haughty with her in many ways, aloof and distant. When they walk together she almost always walks several paces behind him. It's easier to see how much she adores him—folding up his clothes for him when he is in the water, helping him carry his surfboard around, and just gazing so dotingly at him. The relationship seems so conventional and traditional you almost want to worry she is just another woman being taken advantage of by another man. I don't think that's the case, as many other clues suggest she has full awareness of herself and her agency, and also that Shigeru does care very much for her. I suspect, in 1991, that Kitano—who is better known in Japan as a comedian and TV star and whose movies usually involve gangsters and ultraviolence—might have been in a mood to challenge assumptions about the conventional and/or "politically correct" (call it the von Trier impulse).

Then comes the ending, which is so abrupt and yet so subtle about changing everything in a stroke—literally, in a single cut (Kitano also edited the film), as I think I found when I went back to track it down, the best I could—that it leaves you bewildered, and yes, a little at sea. Here is where the attack of the soundtrack is devastating, swelling even bloating with insinuating raw sentimental feeling, as you get your head around what has happened. Then Kitano peppers us with the images of memory—quick cuts of earlier scenes, photos of Shigeru and Takako together, and with others, at different times, often beside the sea. Most important are the photos from the surfing competition where Shigeru had his greatest (if modest) success. Suddenly, it's almost overwhelming. Watching has finally become witness.