By Pawel Mizgalewicz
Looking back at the past, and the thought to fix it – either by covering it up, or by making it better – looks like a fitting choice of subject for Setsuro Wakamatsu, one of Japan’s most experienced directors. Born in 1949, Wakamatsu did not helm any gigantic hits that were shown widely abroad, but is a well known quality in the country and got to work with many of Japan’s popular actors, most famously with Ken Watanabe in „The Unbroken” (“Shizumanu Taiyo”). This time, the director took up a screenplay written by the 90-year-old So Kuramoto, another dependable veteran of the TV and film scene. With “Silence of the Sea”, they tell a story about genius painters at the end of their artistic journey, with dark secrets to untangle. Yet, they dive into the past not only to reminisce, but to use it as a canvas to paint a new masterpiece. While “Silence of the Sea” might not be a masterpiece, it’s also rather worth diving into, as it can bring a lot of emotion with its well-realized, crushing story.
Silence of the Sea is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam
Unlike “The Unbroken”, “Silence of the Sea” is quite a well-paced film, with a lot of events covered during its runtime, even if it also ends up being repetitive in its latter half. The movie feels quite novelistic, with very serious, deep characters and themes. Most of those themes are not exactly Tsukiji market-fresh – looking at the title, we can likely already predict the opening shot, which of course is a peaceful look at the beauty of the calm sea. The film’s second shot is that of a candle’s flame, another easily-understood image. Just like the sea is related to silence, hiding, endless place to bury something in, and the unmoved power that a man can never grasp, the candle’s flame is mostly used to portray human life which burns out and eventually ends. In many ways, “Silence of the Sea” matches its title – filling its convoluted screenplay with strong, classic images.
It starts with Anna Tamura (Kyoko Koizumi), who, as a fortuneteller says, “dreams of a younger man”. The plot quickly focuses on her husband, great painter Shuzo (Koji Ishizaka), as he visits an exhibition celebrating his career and discovers that one of “his paintings” is actually an excellent forgery (or is it actually… an improvement?). In the end, the movie’s main character turns out to be another great painter, though – Lyuji Tsuyama (Masahiro Motoki). The way in which he relates to the Tamuras’ past and present is quite complex, and we discover it little by little, with a detective’s pleasure. While the film lasts around 2 hours, it feels like a big story, as getting the meaning of the whole tale requires thinking about events that were not directly shown on the screen. The characters here are quite like a painting made over another one, with the full meaning of what happened only clear when you consider both the one visible and the old one below.
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As a painter tale, “Silence of the Sea” recalls many stories of great creators that we’ve already seen, particularly the screen favorite Van Gogh. Obsessed with achieving his goal, Tsuyama might experience painting mostly as torture, a cross to bear. It seems at times that Motoki – with gray hair – was mostly instructed to look really cool, rather than tell us too much about the character. The artistic passion here is, in the set pieces, portrayed like the passion of Christ – Tsuyama coughs, vomits blood, and lays down in the darkness of his workshop, as if he’s beaten by the canvas towering in front of him, the string instruments hitting hard in the soundtrack as if they wanted to increase the pain. We see a flashback of the face of the one that the painter thinks about. Of course, there are big analogies between art and love, and lust. Questions about authenticity are asked. All in all, it’s a pretty standard fare of how the subject is usually shot in movies.
The film can be more interesting if we look at it as portrayal of Japanese society at the same time. Secrets of the plot are nicely matched with everyone’s lack of directness. There’s a lot of bowing, a lot of apologizing, and fear of humiliation from all the supporting characters. If we were to doubt that art is an extremely serious thing, we will realize that seeing the face of an exhibition director that has his honor tarnished due to a simple mistake that nobody could have avoided in his place.
Koizumi, Ishizaka and Motoki are all much more confident, but don’t reveal their key emotions to others. It’s all the more visible because of one special character in the movie, which is a mysterious man played by Kiichi Nakai. Nakai’s Suiken is a strikingly direct character that smashes through a lot of story’s barriers, and pushes the ship forward when it meets the shallows. Suiken is also a bit of a stereotype, this time of a Yakuza man – with sunglasses, dark clothes and mildly threatening phone calls in which he doesn’t introduce himself – but due to other characters’ issues, he might be seen as the one person in the story that is brave enough to speak openly, and do it because he genuinely cares about Tsuyama and about art. Very satisfyingly, he says what needs to be said. While it might be unexpected halfway through the film, Nakai ends up as arguably the highlight of it.
The screenings in Rotterdam were the first time “Silence of the Sea” was shown abroad, after debuting in Japan in fall of 2024. According to the producer, it made decent, if a bit underwhelming, box office numbers – with “unsympathetic main characters” mentioned as the possible reason for lack of bigger success. Spending time with these characters definitely does feel a bit like hanging with pretentious artistic elites that are just a bit too much above your level to seem approachable. In the end, though, maybe that fits the film’s obvious theme – after all, we don’t stare at the sea in awe because the see is nice to us. The sea’s depth is never to be fully explored, and we can only wonder what really sits there. Wakamatsu realizes this feeling quite well.
