‘August in the Water’ (dir. Gakuryū Ishii)
Japan Cuts’ repertory screenings don’t tend to receive quite the same fanfare as the first-run films that festival audiences have never seen before, but this year’s 35mm screening of ‘August in the Water’ has the feeling of a main event, and might prove to be the hotter ticket of the two Gakuryū Ishii features that have been selected for the 2024 program (the other is a fittingly surreal Kōbō Abe adaptation called ‘The Box Man’).
Far more subdued than his cyberpunk masterpiece ‘Burst City’ but sweltering with the same penchant for radical subversion, ‘August in the Water’ is a summery romantic drama that gradually melts into a slow-burn portrait of societal collapse. Imagine if ‘Adventureland’ had been weighed down by the psychic strain of ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ or Michael Tolkin’s ‘The Rapture’ and you might have some idea as to how this story — ostensibly about the love triangle between two high school boys and the high-diving prodigy (Rena Komine as Izumi) they both have a crush on — starts to slip off its axis due to a meteor storm caused by a distant black hole. Droughts give way to much stranger plagues, as people’s internal organs begin to petrify amid Izumi’s suspicions that the whole planet might turn into stone, killing everyone on it.
Is she lost in the fog of a schizophrenic episode, or is she bearing witness to the subatomic rebellion of a world sickened by pre-millennial social malaise? The question isn’t rhetorical, but any of the answers you tease from this mesmerizing cosmic whatsit will be entirely your own, as Ishii’s human drama is sublimated into an hallucinatory mindfuck that takes you deep into the darkest crevices of your own head.