Maxance Vincent
After making the Hall Auditorium crowd go absolutely bonkers with his uber-violent, taut closed-set thriller Confession, I had no choice but to see Nobuhiro Yamashita’s other live-action film playing at the Fantasia International Film Festival: Swimming in a Sand Pool.
The prolific filmmaker also has another movie playing, the anime Ghost Cat Anzu, a perfect showcase of his versatility and talent as he swims (pun absolutely intended) into multiple genres and frequently tends to break conventions and traditional tropes, offering us a much more intriguing and compelling picture to sink our teeth into.
With Confession, Yamashita pulled out all the stops and wasn’t afraid to go to places no other filmmaker would’ve ever thought of. It’s often unflinchingly violent and isn’t afraid to utilize comedy to dilute how gruesome it got. It doesn’t all work, but I still appreciated the effort, even after a twist so bad it could only be described as a total screenwriting affront and an insult to the audience’s intelligence.
In Swimming in a Sand Pool, Yamashita is on the opposite side of the spectrum. His aesthetic is deliberately slow, often poetic. His shots are meticulously framed and symmetrical, with each main protagonist occupying a corner of the space, while the camera only moves when it deems itself important, slowly pulling us into its drama. There’s no doubt he’s evoking Yasujiro Ozu’s signature style, especially when it comes to damping the story with ‘pillow shots’ to allow the audience to soak into the world he’s creating.
Like any good Ozu (or, in many respects, Hirokazu Kore-eda), Swimming in a Sand Pool focuses on a relatively simple premise, with four teenage girls forced to clean a sand-covered swimming pool as a baseball team plays nearby. Already, not much is happening, and the plot hasn’t been set at all in motion, but Yamashita creates an enveloping environment, opening the movie with distant soundscapes of the baseball team playing their game as Chizuru (Kiyota Mikuri) pretends to swim.
As she adopts a new method of ‘swimming,’ the camera moves with her, following her pretending to do so with an office chair as the sand-covered pool isn’t done cleaning on its own. These specific moments speak so much of the characters’ place in Yamashita’s film and the environment he’s developing within his 86 minutes. While brief, Yamashita wastes no time introducing us to the four characters we will spend time with for the next hour and twenty minutes and effectively develops their relationship while they are forced to clean the pool.
All of the girls, Chizuru, Miku (Reina Nakayoshi), Kokoro (Saki Hamao), and Yui (Sumire Hanaoka), are here for various reasons, but they will soon learn more about themselves and discover how similar they are to one another as the movie progresses. It may prove to be a big ask for many, as Yamashita wants us to sit with the characters and almost sets the entirety of his movie inside the confines of the swimming pool, but what follows is a potent and emotionally investing mediation on growing up.
Some may think Swimming in a Sand Pool is a traditional coming-of-age tale, and they may be right. However, just like in Confession, Yamashita effectively goes beyond traditional coming-of-age tropes to question not only the girls’ place in society but also how authority figures reduce their evolution and independence.
Kokoro likes to put on makeup, even if the school forbids it. But when she discovers that their teacher also (subtly) wears makeup, it no longer becomes about wearing it but what is considered ‘too much’ makeup. Through this exchange, we learn that girls are held to a high standard in school. These standards are reductive ideals that demonize them inside a conformity box.
The girls don’t want to conform, and the sweeping of the sand pool then becomes an act of something bigger. It’s a quietly meditative film, and an often funny one at that (Yamashita’s humor is second to none and, as of right now, has the best sense of comedic timing I’ve seen in this festival). However, Swimming in a Sand Pool quickly becomes something else entirely, as the girls become empowered to change the rules and confines that have reduced them to mere numbers and figures and won’t allow them to become the humans they are meant to be.
In that regard, Yamashita succeeds in asking cogent questions that aren’t usually explored with this much depth and finesse in traditional coming-of-age stories. He first envelops the audience in its environment to sink us into its characters. Then he introduces the protagonists and further develops their plight as we individually spend time with them and learn their objectives. Finally, he opens up the discussion by quickly dismantling the structures in power simply by showcasing four women sweeping a pool full of sand and questioning their place in the world.
This approach could’ve only been made possible from impeccable talent across the board. The naturalistic dialogues (based on a play written by a teenager) spoken by its lead actresses are immensely believable, and the portrayals brought to life are treated with great care and emotional vulnerability. Together, they give the right notes to each protagonist, and we, in turn, slowly begin to get invested in their individual and, ultimately, shared story.
Swimming in a Sand Pool may not be the most outlandish film at Fantasia, a festival mostly known for over-the-top action and horror films. However, it’s also the perfect example of how eclectic their programming is, especially in regard to Yamashita. One day, we’re watching his violent and bonkers Confession. The other, we’re looking at the most poetic film this festival offers, a great sign of how Yamashita will never repeat himself.
SCORE: ★★★1/2
Comments
Loading…