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AUGUST IN THE WATER
(Mizu no Naka no Hachigatsu)
Rating: ½
Japan. 1995.
Director/Screenplay – Ishii Sogo, Producer – Furuswa Binbun, Photography – Kasamatsu Norimiti, Music – Onogawa Hiroyuki, Production Design – Hayashida Yuji. Production Company – Hill Villa.
Cast:
Komine Rena (Hazuki Izumi), Aoki Shinsuke (Mao), Takari Masaaki (Ukiya), Matsuo Reiko (Miki), Toda Naho (Yo Izumi)
Plot: Earth is being affected by a black hole. Two meteorites land in the Fukuoka area of Japan after which the area becomes affected by a drought. People then start collapsing with what is termed the Turning to Stone disease. In Genkai City schoolgirl Hazuki Izumi goes into a coma after nearly drowning in a diving competition. She emerges to realize the truth about the Turning to Stone disease – Earth is the only planet where stone has become liquefied and people are now returning to their natural state, a place where they are able to mentally commune with all other species again.
One gets the impression that this Japanese arthouse release has sought Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful Stalker (1979) as its model. The films are thematically different but both seem to operate on the notion put forward by J.G. Ballard that disaster should not function as mere drama but rather as a fulcrum of inner psychological processes. Ballard had a mastery of the form. His work is filled with cataclysms – vast droughts, transformations of landscape into crystal, the collapse of civilized order – which are all mirrors of inner states of mind. Stalker was a Ballard-esque film about the inner processes resulting from a mystery meteorite.
But while August in the Water conforms to the Ballard-esque model, the nature of the disaster and the inner psychological processes are so cryptically presented as to leave the entire audience excluded from what is happening. The film makes no real sense whatsoever on a narrative level – the heroine is inexplicably revealed to be a ghost halfway through; water is becoming more solid and this appears to be the universe returning Earth to its natural state; all of this is in some way linked to a drought, although the end of the film which features the end of the drought concomitant with the heroine’s death seems to negate what the film is saying about this. There is a minor subplot involving the killing of a professor but this is developed devoid of connection to anything else.
If anything this is a New Age sf film – one where astrology works, stone markings reveal cryptic knowledge and have mystical importance, and the heroine has a cosmic revelation where she realizes that everything on Earth is made of the same molecules. Certainly whatever it is it is bad sf – the talk about stone being the natural state of all lifeforms in the universe is just total rubbish scientifically speaking. To make things worse the film has a pace that is near to inert.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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