She grows closer to Minato after his death because she sees him through the eyes of Wasabi and Minato’s tetchy sister Yoko ( Honoka Matsumoto). ![]() Hinako’s narrative takes a number of unexpected, leisurely paced turns that, in an unostentatious way, reflect Hinako’s intuitive attempts at finding closure. “Ride Your Wave” is as much about the way we process unexpected events as it is about living with grief. Also: every time she summons him, she always seems to be surprised to see him, because, well, who would expect to see their dead ex in the bathtub? She summons him by singing one of their favorite pop songs, which feels right because the scene where Hinako and Minato first sing together in his car is sweet and unassuming. Hinako’s visions of her dead boyfriend are sometimes too whimsical, but her emotional derangement is never the punchline for cheap jokes. But I always wanted to suspend my disbelief because Yuasa and his collaborators pushed so hard against their better judgment as they tried to faithfully represent Hinako’s post-romantic depression. With that said: there are several scenes in “Ride Your Wave” that, in more inexpert hands, might have been unbearable given its uneven mix of humor and sappiness (seriously, why is his ghost haunting her in the toilet?). They’re not realistic, but they are real enough because the world they live in is believably small. ![]() Her cheekbones and shoulder blades also stick out, and his arms and torso are impossibly lean. You can see Yuasa’s warts-and-all affection for his young lovers in a scene where the ocean breeze causes both Hinako’s dress and Minato’s light denim shirt to puff up as they talk for a moment, they both look like David Byrne in his oversized “ Stop Making Sense” suit. Hinako’s world is also credible because she isn’t treated like the platonic ideal of a teenage girl. He sighs heavily after a while as his colleagues yell somewhere off-screen his carabineer shifts with his weight. You can hear other firemen cheering Wasabi on as he tries to pull himself up by his legs and shimmy from one post to the other. I also love the scene where Minato’s best friend Wasabi ( Kentaro Ito) struggles to regain his balance on a zipline during his firefighter training. I was especially impressed with the movie’s sound design, which gives a clear sense of the romantic isolation that Hinako and Minato experience because of their microscopic environment, like when seaside fireworks pop and hiss in the distance. Director Masaaki Yuasa (“ Lu Over the Wall,” “Mind Game”) and screenwriter Reiko Yoshida’s light, sensitive consideration of Hinako’s feelings is genuinely refreshing, especially Yuasa’s focus on the ambient sounds and earthy details of Hinako and Minato’s romance. That synopsis might make “Ride Your Wave” seem like a tone-deaf and painfully earnest melodrama, but the movie’s unabashed sentimentality never feels unbearable. Sometimes she imagines him as a porpoise, and sometimes, he appears as a tidal wave of ocean water, which suggests that Hinako’s emotions are as substantial as the surf under her board. ![]() Then again, while Minato’s spirit is a figment of Hinako’s imagination, he’s also real: he appears to her in any water surface, including tap and toilet water. ![]() But then Minato dies while trying to save a total stranger, an act of saint-like kindness that’s only credible because he mostly exists in “Ride Your Wave” as an extension of Hinako’s emotions.
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