One of Kikuno's clients is Zenbei (Renji Ishibashi), an older, gentle and caring man who would gladly buy Kikuno's contract from the brothel's mama-san (the wonderful Yumiko Nogawa), if only Kikuno could work up the nerve to leave her no-good yakuza boyfriend, Ginji (Eiji Okuda). Meanwhile, Oshin comes to the rescue of a disgraced samurai on the run, Fusanosuke (Hidetaka Yoshioka), and naturally she falls in love with him.

The Sea Is Watching was advertised as Kurosawa's "final screenplay," but that's simply not true. As detailed in this writer's book, The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa was unable to get the expensive project off the ground, and so instead wrote another script, likewise based on a story by Yamamoto. That script was Ame agaru ("After the Rain"), which was made into an excellent film in 1999, one year after Kurosawa's death, by the Kurosawa-gumi -- that is, the casts and crew that worked with Kurosawa again and again.

Ame agaru's director was Takashi Koizumi, a longtime assistant who became something of a Kurosawa disciple during his many years with the master. Koizumi's film therefore was very respectful and deferential of Kurosawa's approach - seeing it is like watching a new Kurosawa film. One doesn't get that sense at all with The Sea Is Watching. Ame agaru was Koizumi's first feature, but Kei Kumai has been directing movies since the 1960s. His career has been an unpredictable mix of critically-acclaimed arthouse-type dramas like the Oscar-nominated Sandakan 8 (Sandakan hachibanshokan -- bokyo 1975), which lost to Kurosawa's Russian entry, Dersu Uzala, as well as more commercial films like Tunnel to the Sun (Chikado no taiyo, 1968), a box office smash which starred Toshiro Mifune and Yujiro Ishihara. In recent years, Kumai's work has been unapologetically anti-commercial. His last film to see release, however limited, in the United States was Deep River (Fukai kawa, 1995), a very odd anthology about spiritual awakening that was Toshiro Mifune's last film.

Whereas Ame agaru tried and succeeded in playing like a Kurosawa film, The Sea Is Watching Kumai generally opted against using a cast and crew experienced with Kurosawa's methods. Kurosawa's daughter, Kazuko, designed the costumes, and Hidetaka Yoshioka had appeared in most of the director's later films (he was one of the teenagers in Rhapsody in August, for instance), but the production was mainly filled by Kumai regulars like actor Eiji Okuda and composer Teizo Matsumura. Sometimes, as with Okuda, this works just fine. In other respects, however, the result is disastrous. Matsumura, for example, has provided a truly awful, incongruous score, which sounds more or less like Ennio Morricone as performed by the Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. At key dramatic moments, Matsumura's lazy trumpet disrupts whole scenes.

A bigger problem is Misa Shimizu (Warm Water Under a Red Bridge) as the cynical Kikuno. Kurosawa wrote the script with Mieko Harada in mind. Perhaps Japan's finest contemporary actress, Harada became famous around the world as the evil Lady Kaede in Kurosawa's Ran (1985) and, particularly after her terrific performance, also as a lowly prostitute, in Ame agaru, one can't help but think how perfect she might have been. It's rather like watching Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980) and Ran, in which viewers invariably wonder what Toshiro Mifune might have brought to those films had he not fallen out of favor with Kurosawa. But where Nakadai, at least in Ran, gave a great performance, Misa Shimizu is completely unsuited to The Sea is Watching. With her high-cheekbone, icy and model-like features (Kumai seems to favor this type of actress), Shimizu is too flawless to be believable as a heartsick hooker. And though this is probably her best work to date, she still comes across as actorly when she should be emotionally real.

The larger problem is the adaptation itself. I suspect Kurosawa would have brought to it a Red Beard-like historical accuracy to the tiniest details, something lacking in Kumai's film. Kurosawa, particularly after his frustrating relationship with Industrial Light & Magic on Dreams (Yume, 1990), certainly would avoided the cheesy CGI "helicopter" shot seen at the beginning of The Sea is Watching, which has already become a cliché of period films. Similarly, Kurosawa likely would have found a concise, simpler yet more believable way to dramatize the thunderous typhoon which sets the film's climax into motion, instead of the inadequate visual effects and bad acting of this adaptation.

This is not to say Kurosawa is blameless. While Japanese scripts tend to be less detailed than American ones, and thus more open to interpretation, The Sea is Watching's basic story and its characters never realize their full potential. Oshin and Kikuno are simply stock characters for this type of story, and Kurosawa never really makes the movie about them, or much about daily life in the brothel itself, which I think may have been his larger intention. Simply put, any number of Mizoguchi's films - and the somewhat similar Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956) in particular -- are far richer in characterization and have far greater affinity with these sorts of characters.

Video & Audio

The Sea is Watching is presented in 1.85:1 format in a 16:9 transfer. Mastered in High Definition, the image is sharp with great color which really shows off Kazuo Okuhara's fine cinematography and Kazuko Kurosawa's bright kimono. Sound is 5.1 Dolby Digital, though this isn't exactly the kind of movie for showing off one's sound system. English, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Chinese, and Korean subtitles are offered.

Extras

It's not listed on the packaging, but the DVD also includes an eight-minute full-frame featurette, with interviews with Kumai, art director Daisuke Kimura, Kurosawa's look-alike daughter, and others, along with Akira Kurosawa's original storyboards. For some reason, the English subtitle translation for this featurette is quite bad. Whoever translated this mini-documentary certainly favors the words "chic" and "fixated"; the former is used about three dozen times. Fortunately, the featurette is still easy to understand and the movie proper is translated just fine. A 4:3 letterboxed trailer for The Sea is Watching, as well as some other Columbia arthouse titles, is also included.

Parting Thoughts

The influence of Kurosawa, now some five years after his death, is as strong as ever. Apparently Kurosawa's estate hopes to produce or license even more of his unfilmed scripts, some dating back to the 1930s, and there remains an audience eager to see these projects realized. One could argue that The Sea is Watching is simply overcooked - Kurosawa attempting Mizoguchi material by way of Kei Kumai. But Dora heita ("Alley Cat"), yet another Yamamoto story Kurosawa was to have directed, was successfully filmed by Kon Ichikawa in 2000, and that had four writers (Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Masaki Kobayashi). No, The Sea is Watching is a movie I'm very glad was made, one not without its moments, just mediocre.