August in the Water

                       

the night before i watched the movie, i had a dream where i swam around in a supernaturally blue underwater world. me and my roommates were working a seasonal job at a resort floating like rafts, a complex of wooden structures over waves of blue jelly water. a few weeks before that, i was swimming off the shore of an island in lake superior on vacation with my family. when i woke up, it was raining. summer feels like its ending.

theres definitely a wetness in my soul today

 

August In The Water felt like a secret dream dolphin telepathically whispering inside my body

it was stirring, and before anything else, beautifully made in every aspect. the color and camerawork (even the interior design?) spoke to me in more ways then i could count. after seeing it, the boundaries between things felt truly blurred, and left me with a strong desire to keep blurring things.
i loved the mundanity of the story and how slowly the dreamlike unease gave way to its eventual supernatural plot. for a large part, it was just people going about their days doing their best to ignore drought, sickness, and environmental disaster. some elements seemed to come out of nowhere in quiet conversation. like the disease that supposedly turn your organs to stone, which is talked about but never represented visually besides in the occasional really horrific shots of people simply falling dead on the sidewalk, garnering hardly a turn of the head from the crowds around them. 

floods, droughts, storms, and environmental threats are some of my favorite sources of conflict in stories.
the drought and water shortage, despite the pervasive blue decadence of the full pools and aquariums we see, couple with the orange-red of dry heat to give a sensation of internal contradiction and a haunted anxiety. human affairs seem at odds with the earth, but August takes issue with the perception of separation between human beings and the environment, and imagines disconnection and reconnection as a prophesied story of supernatural resurrection.  

 

 

the first movie of Gakuryu Ishii's i saw was Mirrored Mind. together with this movie, it represented a profound feeling of being "under the weather." both movies take you to the edges of the earth. at several points in my life, ive felt a strong desire to escape the bounds of the earth. i felt a sense of being trapped under the atmosphere. in August, theres a concept of the brain being replaced by stone computer chips, which allow the mind to escape the human container, communicate with aliens, visit the moon, and go anywhere in the universe instantly. Earth feels, often, like an island. in Mirrored Mind, the protagonist wanders an island after her mind is transported. i remember my own walks along the shore and how the breeze sometimes stirred me into tossing off my clothes and running into the waves. i felt then that i could take that place with me anywhere, because no matter where i am, even when im not conscious of it, i am entirely of the earth. 

 

anyway, i loved this movie. daisuke igarashi feels like a strong analog in manga, from what ive read. i will probably try to check out ishii's other work in the future. i feel like this movie hit me at just the right time.