Warm Water Under a Red Bridge

May well be Imamura's funniest film; it is also one of his most accomplished. It is the work of a mature artist who has kept his adventurous spirit alive, which he has expressed in a complex and risky work carried off with an effortlessness that comes only from wisdom and experience.

Imamura's delight in the infinite oddity of men and women is goofy; it's also, at heart, reverent.

A movie about love, friendship and finding oneself, and it takes all its subjects very seriously while seeming to treat them with the lightest and most piquant of touches. Like its bizarre heroine, it irrigates our souls.

One never knows where "Warm Water" is going and even though the film's objective feels a little fuzzy even at the end a parable on female sexuality? an ode to liberty? there's such a joy in the telling that it doesn't matter terribly.

Funny and endearing.

The film may be lighter in tone than Imamura's more recent work, but it still has a number of serious things to say about life in contemporary Japan.

Plays like a nutty psychological mystery.