On Monday at 7 PM, the Chicago Film Society will screen a 35-millimeter print of the Japanese drama A Scene at the Sea (1991) at the Music Box Theatre. Along with Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis (which plays from 35-millimeter at Doc Films on Sunday at 7 PM), it’s the best repertory screening in town this week—the film’s nuanced, small-scale storytelling provides a welcome antidote to the expensive bombast that’s crowding the multiplexes. A Scene at the Sea tells the simple tale of a young man who dreams of becoming a competitive surfer; his doting girlfriend supports his decision, and both characters are welcomed into the local surfing scene. Yet their relationships—with their new friends and with each other—fail to last more than a season, and the young man and woman go their separate ways. The film is less about narrative than it is about capturing certain universal experiences, specifically the love and friendships of one’s early 20s, and it succeeds poignantly in that regard.
Critics tend to describe A Scene at the Sea as an outlier in Kitano’s career because of its lack of violence and criminal characters. In Japan the film was widely viewed as the hobby work of a popular comedian; Kitano would not be taken seriously as a filmmaker until Fireworks won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Kitano has explored the more sensitive side of his personality in such films as Kikujiro (1999) and Achilles and the Tortoise (2008), but A Scene at the Sea remains virtually unique in his body of work in its relative simplicity. Tethered to only the slightest narrative, the film evokes the experience of early love and disappointment in a manner both sharp and tender.
