A Scene at the Sea (1991)

Whole time I had feeling I'm watching a cross between ''Napoleon Dynamite'' and some of Jim Jarmusch's movies... but not funny ^^
Movie isn't bad altough you might get dissaponted if you get used to Takeshi's Yakuza bad ass characters. You won't find anything like that here.
It also isn't typical cute romance like some school dramas... it's more like slice of life drama.
There is also not much going on on surface... not much talking( well main character is deaf;) yet action slowly moves forward... but i guess it's the way people live at coast ;]

Even if you won't like movie I'm sure you will like music. Very nice tunes.

Lees verder

Assured, poetic and a gently unassuming cinematic masterpiece

Takeshi Kitano is one of the few directors who can bring me to tears in seemingly every manner possible, A Scene at the Sea is no exception. A beautifully realised tale of an outsider who almost unwittingly finds himself embraced by a community he seems virtually indifferent to in his single-minded determination to master a new and chance-discovered obsession. Tethered to only the slightest narrative, the film evokes the experience of early love and disappointment in a manner both sharp and tender. Kitano has managed to excel himself by retaining all the interesting and original traits of his more graphic films, yet managing to tell a story that is just as deep and provocative, only to a more subtle degree. With much of the film playing with no dialogue at all, it's down to the body language and facial expressions of the performers, the shot choice and the editing skills of the director to tell the story, you only need to have seen one of Kitano's other directorial works to know that this is a long way from a tall order. The camera work is extremely sedate and enveloping, managing to capture the beautiful tranquillity of the ocean. The characters do not speak, yet the story never seems to drag at all, with each scene drawing the viewer steadily into this very attractive and insular world that they inhabit. And then there's Joe Hisaishi's music... A haunting mixture of marimba, synthesisers, piano & strings, it augments the atmospheric stillness and compliments the mood of the film perfectly. A hugely important film in Kitano's development as a filmmaker, one in which he discarded his dramatic safety net to tell a small story in a resolutely minimalist fashion and scored a bold, quietly brilliant bulls-eye. There's no violence, precious little dialogue and the tone and pacing vary little throughout, yet the hold exerted by the characters and storytelling is considerable, one that speaks in confident whispers instead of shouting its qualities in the manner of more attention-grabbing early works from any number of younger filmmakers the world over. A Scene at the Sea remains to this day one of his most assured, poetic and yet gently unassuming cinematic achievements, one that can be genuinely moving but never slips for a moment into sentimentality. I love it.

Lees verder