Slippery When Wet: Warm Water Under a Red Bridge

If you look at Shohei Imamura’s sweetly kinky Warm Water Under a Red Bridge through an American lens, you’d be surprised to find the beating heart of a Hallmark movie pumping through the whole thing. You have a high-strung city boy, Koji Yakusho’s recently unemployed salaryman, Yosuke; a cozy, magical small town found in the picturesque seaside hamlet of Noto; and the piece de resistance in a sweet and welcoming local woman with secrets of her own, Misa Shumizu’s Saeko. As with other romantic peers like Falling for Vermont and Sweet Carolina, this film boils down to a buttoned-up city slicker learning a thing or two about life and love thanks to a small town and its charming folks—just with a tad more squirting.

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge dares to ask: what if true love resulted in lots and lots of squirting? Somehow, Imamura delivers this answer in such a subdued and cozy way that, yes, lots and lots of squirting can be pretty romantic! But the filmmaker goes beyond the cheap laugh of that concept and looks at the impact of the squirting and what it means to both a lonely, lost man and the small town he stumbles upon. Certainly, Warm Water seems to have an affinity for the smaller things in life (preposterous geysers of love water notwithstanding), something that the main character Yosuke figures out through the film's two-hour runtime. Recently unemployed and finding no comfort, acceptance, or need from his metropolitan setting or cold wife, Yosuke, with nothing left to lose, follows the guidance of a dead old man's claim of gold to be found in Noto. Allegedly placed in a house somewhere in town, the gold is Yosuke's for the taking if he can find it. Instead, what the wandering soul finds is the peculiar Saeko, a polite woman with a wet secret. Cue the surprising romance and the growing fondness for small-town Japan.  Again, the main pieces set up aren’t anything new, but Imamura, working with co-writers Daisuke Tengan and Motofumi in adapting a novel by Yo Henmi, turns what could’ve been an amusing Saturday Night Live sketch into a legitimate tale of lovers, water, and acceptance.

Warm Water lives in that space between kooky and relaxed, the former visualized through the literal geysers of water that emit from Saeko during her many trysts with Yosuke, while the latter subtly centers these goofy outbursts with moments of slice-of-life small-town calm and quiet meditations on our place in such a strange world. While the “set-pieces” of the film certainly deliver on the plot’s ridiculous promises, Warm Water stays memorable through Shigeru Komatsubara’s surprisingly expansive camerawork, capturing a majority of the film in enticing wide shots that demonstrate the beauty of Noto. Shinchiro Ikebe’s equally alluring score—mixing moments of goofy levity and subdued contemplation—helps to paint the larger unique feel of Imamura’s romance. The filmmaker isn't in a rush to get to the end of this story—he takes his time putting Yosuke and the audience under the slow but sure charms of the sleepy town and its eclectic residents. While these moments of wandering around town are well-composed, the resulting molasses-sweet pacing of the film can sometimes result in something that works better as a pleasant background of noise and visuals rather than a fully engrossing story.

However, when the film returns to our main characters wooing each other, the results are pretty damn cute (and a little hot). Yakusho and Shimizu prove to be able on-screen partners even if, outside of Shimizu’s character’s very apparent “quirk,” the performers aren’t tasked with taking on super complex characters. Yakusho plays Yosuke with a resigned air of defeat, punctuated by moments where the formerly tidy businessman finds himself stumbling and running after Saeko creating some of the film's funniest moments as, like a rabid dog, Yosuke hornily runs to Saeko's booty calls. As the less stuffy of the two lovers, Shimizu seems to be having a blast as the sweet and horny Saeko. Blunt and more than open about her "affliction," Shimizu almost at times seems to be playing Saeko with a sort of femme fatale edge, except instead of backstabbing Yosuke, she's really just trying to get the dude to relax. This matching of the shrewd and the uninhibited is nothing new. Still, the chemistry between the two actors creates some of the film’s more enjoyable scenes proving that watching a really well-acted romance is much more enjoyable than seeing a woman gushing water at orgasm and creating a bountiful river nearby (though that's pretty cool too). Still, it’s a shame the film seems to haphazardly throw a few overdramatic challenges and arguments in our main characters’ way in the last 20 minutes. While one of those moments ultimately results in the film’s hilarious money shot, it can’t quite make the preceding moments feel any less than unnecessary.

Overall, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is certainly one of the more unique romantic comedies out there. Simultaneously a movie you can and can't watch with your parents, Imamura's film remains a soft-footed tale of star-crossed lovers making do with their lots in life. Finding a delicate sweet spot between stained-corner kink and sugary sweet small-town comfort, this film proves that you can get away with anything as long as the romance at the center of it all is strong enough.

This screening was seen as part of the AFS Lates series. For future showtimes, click here.