Still the Water

Which ever way you slice it, Nao­mi Kawase’s maligned 2014 Cannes com­pe­ti­tion con­tender, Still the Water, is misty-eyed, tin-eared, pompous tom­my­rot. 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. Some may see it as death­ly slow, oth­ers chron­i­cal­ly unfo­cused, as its lead pro­tag­o­nists, a pair of chron­i­cal­ly shy high-school­ers feel­ing the ini­tial pangs of sex­u­al­i­ty, lope about a weath­er­beat­en ter­rain of a small sea­side town doing noth­ing much of interest.

It’s main prob­lem is that Kawase has built a film around two slight­ly way­ward teenage char­ac­ters, both of whom come across as entire­ly false, con­structs of a the­o­ry-dri­ven artist and not some­one intent on cap­tur­ing real­i­ty. There’s an inher­ent belief that peo­ple of that age are nav­i­gat­ed entire­ly by naivety and they wait patient­ly for the adults in their lives – how­ev­er frac­tured – to instruct them the eth­i­cal and emo­tion­al codes by which they should live. It just nev­er rings true.

Kawase’s the­sis asks, what’s the point in love when mor­tal­i­ty con­stant­ly threat­ens to rip that ephemer­al joy from us at a moment’s notice. An ene­my of sub­tly, the direc­tor first pos­es this ques­tion in the film’s open­ing sequence, when a cud­dly gen­tle­man with a fluffy white beard and cer­e­mo­ni­al head-dress (there, pos­si­bly, to pla­cate any sug­ges­tion of non-rit­u­al bar­barism), runs his shav­ing razor across the jugu­lar of a goat dan­gling from a branch. The gory par­tic­u­lars have been cut for the UK release. But as a way of intro­duc­ing a theme, it’s tough to think of a less elo­quent strategy.

The sto­ry flesh­es out the woes of these two teens on the cusp of adult­hood, but does so in a way which feels rushed and obvi­ous. There are ret­i­cent beach-side con­ver­sa­tions about sex, cliched heart-to-hearts with estranged par­ents, a peri­od of ultra sen­ti­men­tal truth-telling with a dying moth­er, and, to cap it all off, a big ol’ storm. When­ev­er lost for some­thing to say, Kawase edits in some shots of crash­ing waves or a calm beach, whichev­er nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na hap­pens to shore up the cur­rent mood. Its pur­port­ed­ly tran­scen­dent finale, too, is unearned.