Product Details

• Actors: Misa Shimizu, Nagiko Tono, Masatoshi Nagase, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Eiji Okuda
• Directors: Kei Kumai
• Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Shugoro Yamamoto
• Producers: Haruyuki Machida, Hirotake Yoda, Koshiro Ando, Kouichi Miyagawa, Masaya Nakamura
• Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Japanese (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Georgian, Chinese, Thai
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• DVD Release Date: November 18, 2003
• Run Time: 119 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0000CGNEG
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #80,710 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Sea Is Watching" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

To film lovers around the world, The Sea Is Watching is a welcome parting gift from Akira Kurosawa, who wrote the screenplay based on two short stories by one of his favorite authors, Syugoro Yamamoto, but was unable to make the film prior to his death in 1998. Kurosawa left detailed storyboards and production notes, entrusting veteran director Kei Kumai to bring his vision to the screen. The results are both glorious and rather mild, by Kurosawa standards, but this gentle melodrama about love, loss, and survival retains much of the peaceful optimism that informed Kurosawa's final films. Set in the 19th century Edo period, the story focuses on the prostitutes of a seaside village brothel, where the vulnerable geisha O-Shin (Nagiko Tohno) endures one heartbreaking love and a potential second, while the more cynical Kikuno (Misa Shimizu) combats misery with harmless fantasies that bolster her spirits. Nature plays a role, and a climactic typhoon has a cleansing effect, offering hope in the wake of destruction, as if the sea had been watching all along. And like the sea itself, Kurosawa's spirit washes over this beautiful film, compromised only by music that's more sentimental than Kurosawa would have allowed. -- Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent film by a lesser master., November 26, 2003

By	Daniel C. Wilcock "journal-ist" (Osaka, Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Sea is Watching may never have been filmed by its author, the
late great master of Japanese Cinema Akira Kurosawa, but it fits very, VERY, nicely in a collection of his other films. Kurosawa's films mostly featured men and their world, particularly his early muscular films like Seven Samurai. I think he wrote this film after reflecting on this point. So seldom does the focus of the galaxy of samurai films remain on the jilted-lover, the poor woman left behind. Not only does this film do that, it focuses on the dregs of society - prostitutes. Yet the world of the prositiutes is not stark. It is rich and colorful. Here it is nice to see state-of-the-art production values brought to a Kurosawa story: we can watch one of his stories in crisp color. The basic story line is a theme universal in Kurosawa's films: the struggle for human dignity in an unforgiving world. Nature is also personified and plays a role in the drama - a recurring theme throughout Kurosawa's work.
The movie centers around a young geisha named O-Shin who seems destined for a higher life but is constantly ground into the dirt. Just as she thinks the worst has come, nature plays its part. The sea that watches the prostitures "water trade" and fleeting lives, fittingly has the last say. Director Kei Kumai may not possess Kurosawa's cinematic flair nor feverish genius.
But he does turn in a handsome film worthy to be included in Kurosawa's legacy.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How the sea watches, destroys, and purifies, July 4, 2004

By	Daniel J. Hamlow (Narita, Japan) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Sea Is Watching [VHS] (VHS Tape)

As seen in Umi Wa Miteiru, life for prostitutes in Japanese brothels towards the end of the Tokugawa period was rough. Women there have fallen in status or have the bad luck of being unable to support themselves any other way. Wearing brightly-coloured kimonos and lots of makeup, they drum up business by soliciting prospective customers on the street. And the mission statement of prostitutes is cheekily given at one point by two of them: give the customers a good time and never get involved. If they fall in love, you don't. And make sure you get paid.

Falling in love-that's the trouble with O-shin. She has a good heart, but keeps giving it away, as someone observes, and she keeps getting involved with customers. One is a young samurai named Fusanosuke Ihara, for whom she covers up when he flees after drawing his sword and wounding a man. Following the rules of the house, she forbids him to come to her, and even has Kikuno, one of the senior girls lie to the samurai. However, she's in love, though disheartened by the caste difference between them. He tells her how there's always change, and despite her body being soiled, she could be pure again if she stopped. The other girls band together to help her achieve this life, by taking on her customers and giving her the money so she can get married and be respectable, but disappointment is ahead.

Kikuno herself has two very different customers. One is a kindly older man who asks her to live with him. A friend of the madam, he always visits, bringing sweets to share with the other women. The other is a yakuza-type who sponges off her, and is pretty rough with her. Kikuno though, prides herself on her samurai background, something that at one point arouses the envy of O-kichi, one of the other girls. O-kichi herself takes O-shin's disappointment with Fusanosuke so personally, the other girls have to drag her away screaming, which can be heard for some time, and would be funny were it not so heartbreaking for O-shin, who easily gains the sympathy of the viewer. But Kikuno is a very dependable young woman, even becoming acting madam when the real madam goes to the spa for her illness, willing to take responsibility and look after the other girls like they were her younger sisters.

Then there's the quiet and brooding Ryosuke, someone who has consistently drawn the short straw all his life, forced to be a child beggar protected by a dog, to learning a trade but never being paid. Full of desperation, he has resorted to getting money that was legally his at knifepoint. O-shin finds herself pitying this man who has been cheated and trampled on all his life. The others think he would bring bad luck to O-shin, already burdened with getting money to look after her little sister. Misfortune doubled would thus equal misery.

The customs and caste differences serve as a reminder that we're looking into another world. In the case of Fusanosuke, he has to go to his relatives as a courtesy call following his father forgiving him for his indiscretion. It serves not only as an apology but as a dedication that one is willing to do better this time around and not shame the family. Another is the way prostitutes escort their customers to the door, thanking them, and asking them to come again, or the courteous greeting call of "ira-shaimaseh!" or "please come in!" from the assigned greeter. And of course, how people remove their geta or sandals before entering.

The wooden steps leading down to the forbidden district seem to make it a separate world from Edo. The festive atmosphere from a parade lightens the film at times. And this film, written by Akira Kurosawa and directed by Kei Kumai, projects a message of hope for the downtrodden, those cheated by life, that some divine power or force is watching them. The sea thus manifests its Shiva/Vishnu-like dichotomy at the climactic, horrifying end, destroying the old with a fury, but ushering in a new start for everyone.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Slow but not boring, March 20, 2007

By	orangekay (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This is not a film for fans of epic battles or monumental amounts of gore, nor is it for those with a short attention span. Without giving anything away, the script spends a good 50% of its time developing a very simple, cliché and generally predictable love story. It is during this time that I found myself sitting there wishing I hadn't wasted money on what I felt was a studio's attempt to cash in on the unfinished work of a dead master by producing such a dreadful period piece. However, if you stick to your guns, this trite and contrived story eventually gives way to a larger and more interesting story that had been running underneath the surface, and this one is where the payoff lies.

Would Kurosawa have shot it differently? Almost certainly, but he's dead, so there's no point in arguing about that. The writing is very much in tune with all of his later works however, and I do believe that this film told the story he wanted to tell successfully regardless of who sat behind the camera. The chroma keying at the end was pretty shabbily done, but otherwise I ended up enjoying the film quite a bit despite my initial impressions. It certainly makes that other big-budget Geisha movie look like a steaming pile of something in comparison.