August in the Water

A long drought is going on. The water is cut off in the city, meteorites fall from the sky, and a strange illness appears in the hospitals: people's internal organs are turning to stone. At the same time Izumi, a high school student, dives from a tower and loses consciousness for a while. When she wakes something has changed; the girl knows something about water and about the sky and cannot explain it. Mao watches her. The illness spreads on one side while Izumi tries to understand what has happened in her body. Gakuryu Ishii wrote and directed. Rena Komine and Shinsuke Aoki are in the cast. It is a Japanese production. The director had been known in the eighties for fast, loud punk films; this belongs to a period in which he had gone entirely quiet. The narrative mixes science fiction with mysticism and does not try to explain its events. The matter it treats is the human bond with matter; water, stone and the body are handled on the same plane. The film gives long stretches to images of sky, water and cloud. There is little dialogue and the narrative moves largely through image and sound. The narrative sets a coming of age story beside a story of catastrophe. It was shot in Fukuoka and the locations are kept ordinary. The ending explains nothing. Its limit is access; the narrative is opaque, the plot weak, and the pace very slow. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental Japanese cinema and narratives without explanation. Who it is not for: it is closed, slow, and the ending unresolved.