Ride Your Wave movie review & film summary (2020)

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. 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. 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. 

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. He sighs heavily after a while as his colleagues yell somewhere off-screen; his carabineer shifts with his weight. It's a brief but revealing moment.

Hinako’s world is also credible because she isn’t treated like the platonic ideal of a teenage girl. 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. Her cheekbones and shoulder blades also stick out, and his arms and torso are impossibly lean. They’re not realistic, but they are real enough because the world they live in is believably small. 

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