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.

Sonatine (1993)

Japan, 94 minutes
Director/writer/editor: Takeshi Kitano
Photography: Katsumi Yanagijima
Music: Joe Hisaishi
Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Aya Kokumai, Tetsu Watanabe, Masanobu Katsumura, Susumu Terajima, Ren Osugi, Tonbo Zushi, Ken'ichi Yajima, Eiji Minakata

There are at least two other movies named Sonatine. One is a 1984 Canadian feature described on IMDb.com as "Two teenaged friends have separate difficult experiences that make the girls seriously consider suicide." The other is a French short described on its Facebook page as "A once successful actress has taken refuge at her sister's home. Her presence triggers deep-seated feelings that lead to a tragic outcome." It is also the name of a piece for piano by classical composer Maurice Ravel. Try looking up the word and you soon arrive at "sonatina," defined as follows: "As a musical term, sonatina has no single strict definition; it is rather a title applied by the composer to a piece that is in basic sonata form, but is shorter, lighter in character, or more elementary technically than a typical sonata."

Pursuing: Sonata, according to Wikipedia, "literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata, a piece sung." And so, as best I can tell, we have arrived at the fiction writer's shibboleth, "show, don't tell," with some overlying implication of insubstantiality, in terms of what the intriguing title is intended to convey. As much as anything Sonatine works like a musical piece—not to mention that it also contains wonderful music. Director, writer, and editor Takeshi "Beat" Kitano has created a befuddling movie that sits quietly and observes—observes contemporary (for 1993) Japanese yakuza gangster life, and more particularly observes the existential crisis of one specific mid-level chief, Aniki Murakawa (played by Kitano, which makes him a four-tools moviemaker at least).

English Beat, "Twist & Crawl" (1980)

(listen)

From the (English) Beat's amazing debut, I Just Can't Stop It, which is essential. This song was never a hit or even a single as far as I know but it got to be my favorite, probably because it was about the point where I could feel my neck starting to snap off from the rapid-fire assault of tempo on that first vinyl side, and I was impelled to get up and in for some living room dance time. It followed "Mirror in the Bathroom," which kicked the side off splendidly, and two more good ones, culminating ultimately with "Click Click," at 1:28. "Twist & Crawl" at 2:34 is more of your everyday type of impossibly fast quick-stepper. Once started, if you try to keep time to it nodding your head, you will see what I am talking about. Oh, sweet youth. The band at this moment at the top of their powers, something to behold, even just hearing them on the album. The simple unassuming way it enters in, built from drum patterns, then bass and rhythm guitar, insinuating itself even as it subtly boosts the tempo, playing it faster and faster, but not so you notice much until the painful neck snapping interrupts your reverie. Time to get on your feet now. Alas, from here the English Beat just went to fracturing, though not without its pleasures along the way. Over the long decades it has evolved into one unit called the Beat (UK), headed up by Ranking Roger, and another called the English Beat (US), fronted by Dave Wakeling. A friend reports in from a recent English Beat (US) show in Annapolis that Dave Wakeling was embarrassingly drunk, but Antonee First Class kept it together and made it work—good show, overall.

Special Beat Service (1982)

"I Confess" With their third album in little more than two years, the Beat had deepened and mellowed from their new wave origins into something awfully close to a for-real soul band even as they continued to swing wild stylistically. That soul impression might be due only to the presence of a full-fledged horn section on several of the tracks, but I think it actually has more to do with the quantum leaps forward taken by Ranking Roger, who gets a certain amount of convincing desperation into his yelping vocal performance when the songs call for it. The songwriting and especially the arrangements (piano player Dave Blockhead really starts bringing it here) are better too, more cohesive in putting together an organic sound—it's a band that knows itself pretty well by this point—though they still don't appear to have a lot to say. It all seemed promising enough but, unfortunately, this was the end of the line for them, at least for a couple of decades, as the principals blew apart and went on to various other projects, most notably General Public (Ranking Roger, guitarist/singer Dave Wakeling) and Fine Young Cannibals (guitarist Andy Cox, bassist David Steele, joining forces with singer Roland Gift). Ah, Britain. Ah, the '80s. To me, this was the Beat's most quixotic and fascinating album, one that I played often, patiently waiting for some deep connections I sensed there to kick in. Hearing it again all this time later surprises me how it produces the same sensation. It's a perfectly pleasant, even enticing 40 minutes, and it's not even far-fetched to wonder if it won't one day yet become a kind of small obsession or wonder in itself. But yeah, then the attention seems to wander off again.

I Just Can't Stop It (1980)

"Twist & Crawl" The Beat (forced by legal skirmishing to operate as the English Beat in North America, concession to LA singer/songwriter Paul Collins who was heading up a power pop band at the time with the name) were key players in the UK's 2 Tone ska moment of the late '70s and early '80s, along with the Specials, Madness, Bad Manners, and others. It's called "2 Tone" for the obvious reasons and also because that was the name of the label that signed and distributed most of them. Though this debut and the band itself has many of the trappings and even authentic elements of the original ska—most notably in the person of saxophonist Saxa, whose resume extends back to work with Desmond Dekker, Laurel Aitken, Prince Buster, and others—it sounds to me now more like new wave with a Jamaican patois (courtesy vocalist Ranking Roger, nonetheless a Brit): fast tempos, twitchy rhythms, verse-chorus-verse, random and statement-making covers ironic and otherwise (Smokey Robinson's "Tears of a Clown," Andy Williams's "Can't Get Used to Losing You," Prince Buster's "Rough Rider"), and all of it delivered to the sacred service of F-U-N. Well, you could do a lot worse, and how. The Beat may not have stuck around long but everything they did was pretty great, infectious, irresistible, thoroughly charming, and with all the crushing weight of a feather, even on the occasional essays at message (such as "Click Click," which appears to oppose guns but plays like a seizure). That's a lot more than you can say for too many acts who overstayed their welcomes and then some. On this impressive debut, the Beat delivers good music for summer days and summer nights, for drinking beer and dancing on backyard patios until the neighbors call the police (you should have remembered to invite them in the first place). It's good loud, particularly with frequent and regular administrations, and can also fit nicely into a daily regimen.