Mizu no naka no hachigatsu

I don't want to overpraise 'Fishes in August' because I know this film won't reach everyone -- even if it should. But those of us who love it will love it in an absolute way. Its central character Kenji is so tenderly drawn -- it's as fine a portrait as there is of that awkward moment when an adolescent is trying so hard to attain his adulthood. 'Fishes in August' is quiet and well observed. You may not have lived the moments in your own life that unfold up on the screen, but the reality that the film creates comes very close to feeling like a fully inhabited experience.

Kenji is a quiet, solitary kid growing up in Chiba, in the industrial outskirts of Tokyo. His neighborhood and his family are likewise on the margins of the culture. They live a looser kind of life there - it is not the rigid, formal society we project as typically Japanese. In his 18th summer, Kenji seems to have done a good job of bringing himself up. His mother is no longer on the scene and his father, though respected, is nearly as nonexistent in his life. He seems to have grown up well despite a lack of help or guidance. But he has reached the age of adulthood without the skills to navigate it. He is adrift. He seems to know no other way but to live a fateful kind of life, a life of passive waiting, a waiting for his life to unfold. For now, he has somehow retained an innocence he no longer has any use for. He knows that it's time for the dissolution of his adolescence but has no idea how to go about it. He is a lamb. Or maybe a fish. He swims when he is confused or lonely. It is THE dependable calm in his life.

Kenji has too much time and undirected energy on his hands and has no idea what to do with either - except to burn them up swimming or riding his bike. His emotional maturity is emerging without his knowing what to do about it. He has a crush on Reiko but is helpless in Love's face. It's not so much that it is painful to watch his yearning and his attempts to express his emotions. It is that we know the pain of it too well ourselves, and it is with this knowingness in our deepest hearts that we watch him as helplessly.

First-time director Yoichiro Takahashi has such command of every element of every frame that you can't help but feel exhilaration at his filmmaking. You marvel over and over at how he is able to create a visual metaphor that echos the emotional moment of the scene. This is not decorative filmmaking. Takahashi composes scene after scene that is so fully realized...you thrill at seeing someone working at this level of accomplishment.