Warm Water Under A Red Bridge

One of Shohei Imamura’s most ribald films (2001)a well-told fantasy about a young woman in a fishing village on the Noto peninsula (The Eel’s Misa Shimizu) with a strange physical condition that essentially turns her into a sexual geyser when she’s aroused. She gets involved with a middle-aged businessman (The Eel’s Koji Yakusho, also a familiar lead in Kiyoshi Kurosawa films) who loses his job and wife, then turns up in the village looking for a golden Buddha stolen from a Kyoto temple that’s said to be in the young woman’s house. Things get much more complicated after that, but interest never flags over 119 minutes. This isn’t a major effort, but it’s an enjoyable one. In Japanese with subtitles. (JR) Read more