The Inland Sea

Director: Lucille Carra
Studio: Image Entertainment
Product Type: DVD

Description

Lucille Carra, with Brian Cotnoir, re-creates the lyrical vision of old Japan captured by Donald Richie in his classic travel memoir. Richie, one of the foremost Western authorities on Japanese cinema and culture, juxtaposes the ongoing conflict between traditional and modern values with the serene beauty of the area known as the Inland Sea. The result is a rewarding personal journey for the heart, the mind and the senses.

Customer Reviews:

A true portrait of Japanese modus vivendi.......2005-04-24

This is what it is like to live in Japan. I was amazed to see it captured so perfectly on film. The scenery, the pace of life, the day-to-day people and things, everything is at once completely real and yet tinged with nostalgia. Overlaying this vision is the inner musings of Donald Richie, a man with profound insight on the island nation of Japan, and what it is like to live there as a foreigner. Almost every time, his thoughts were familiar ones, reflections that I myself have had on the sights and people I have seen.

"The Inland Sea" is a leisurely tour across the Seto Inland Sea, the body of water that separates the island of Shikoku from the main island of Honshu. Donald Richie reads passages from his acclaimed travel-diary of the same name, published some 30 years earlier. Retaking this trip as an older man, Richie is nostalgic but still reverent of the lifestyle along this stretch of water. The images drift across small, perfect islands that look like something from a painting, to elegant coffee shops and covered shopping arcades, to an gorgeous, isolated island where lepers live, playing gateball and waiting to die peacefully. Everything is authentic.

Richie is also honest with himself in his dialog, sometimes uncomfortably so. He acknowledges things about being a traveler, such as the sexual freedom that people can find in Japan, without coming off as salacious or exploitative. It is something that simply is a part of the journey, as much as the occasional loneliness and the awe.

Unlike so many travel guides of Japan, "The Inland Sea" does not attempt to highlight the strangeness of Japan, the unfamiliar food and customs. It does not put forth a "Japan! Wow!" tour of the exciting sites and great majesties you can find there. People looking for that sort of thing will find themselves disappointed by it. Rather, like a boat gently drifting down a slow river, it shows real people living their real lives, and it does so beautifully.

The Japan I loved.......2004-06-04

The Inland Sea is a beautifully made documentary which is really more poetry than documentary. I was born in Japan and I can smell, touch and feel the flavor. This is really more like a European art film than a documentary and Donald Richie is very funny and wry. I cried at the end. A must for those who truly understand Japan.

More about His own inner fantasies than reality........2003-10-02

Basically footages of Japan off the usual tourist track and nothing more. There are still many beatiful towns in Japan today so I don't see how this film captured anything lost or vanishing in Japan. Besides, its so boring!

His narration is self centered talking about Japanese culture as if he knows something about it(he doesn't). He also focuses on women, young japanese women too much making me think that this love affair with Japan is more of a love affair with its women - he stereo types them as docile, submissive and "made to please man" types.

Haunting journey to a lost Japan.......2003-08-29

The Inland Sea is a film version of Donald Richie's celebrated memoir. Uncannily, the film closely follows the interior nature of the book, and the truly beautiful images match the lost villages and shrines Richie described forty years ago. He sensitively narrates his own poetic prose, which has moments of wry humour. If you've ever visited rural Japan, you won't believe your eyes. It re-captures the whole mood and you can watch this film over and over again.

Nice scenery -- terrible script!.......2003-07-09

A prodigiously dull tour through the less-seen islands and coastlands of Japan, narrated by an American expatriate and author who relocated in order to experience "the real Japan." His pompous prose irritates and bores by turns, and is maddeningly self-centered. He praises uncritically all things Japanese, and castigates the evil West (a familiar, if tiresome theme). "Sex makes, in its own way, the ideal souvenir" is just one of the dubious gems of this skippable travelogue. Conceivably useful for students of Japanese culture, it is to be hoped that the viewer will exercise more discernment than did the author. Though my family normally loves travel videos, we voted this one a must-skip for all but the most determined insomniac.

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