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The sea may be watching, but I doubt anyone else will give the time of day to this half-baked period melodrama directed by Kei Kumai and based on a script by Akira Kurosawa. Poor O-Shin (Nagiko Tono), a young prostitute at a seaside brothel near 19th-century Tokyo, really knows how to pick them. First she falls in love with Fusanosuke (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a young samurai who’s fled to her room for refuge after wounding a man in a drunken brawl. Talk about aiming too high. Then there’s Ryosuke (Masatoshi Nagase), a suicidal loser with even worse luck than O-Shin herself — he’s too low even for a prostitute. Trying to keep O-Shin on track is older, wiser brothel mate Kikuno (Misa Shimizu), who tells her not to fall in love and always get paid. Of course, as these sentimental scenarios often work out (Kurosawa, genius though he was, was at heart an old softie, and Kumai has lost his edge since making the similar Sandakan 8 in 1975), Kikuno proves more of a pushover than O-Shin, and once the film gets its sea metaphor going (rain, flood, the whole pathetic fallacy), things get soggy indeed. To get an idea of how far the Japanese film industry has declined, compare this film with anything by Kenji Mizoguchi. In Japanese with English subtitles. (119 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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