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An early example of the "sweet" Takeshi Kitano, A Scene at the Sea reflects his minimalist realism more than his quiet humor or his impulse to surprise. A young, deaf garbage man in a beach town finds a discarded surfboard and decides to take up the sport. After endless practice, with his girlfriend watching from the beach, he excels, joins tournaments and becomes friends with the local surf crowd. Kitano's gaze also strays to surrounding characters in slight, funny subplots, so that A Scene at the Sea at times seems like a collective story. Much of the film could literally be summed up in the immortal words of the Beach Boys, "Let's go surfin' now/Everybody's learnin' how," but its tone is closer to the dreamy "Let's Go Away for a While" from Pet Sounds. In fact, though it's worth seeing for Kitano fans, it drags even by Japanese art film standards. It's Kitano almost totally drained of his sudden spasms of violence and gentle slapstick humor, as minutes go by featuring nothing but mediocre surfing and nearly expressionless spectating. But there is his signature realism, which in this case takes a genre famous for excitement and stunning scenery and makes us thankful we aren't squinting in the midday sun on an industrial strip of sand or riding puny waves. If anything, this is probably a good movie about what surfing is really like in Japan, or was during the late Eighties and early Nineties, when boards and wetsuits were bright enough to cause retina damage. And it may have helped inspire the lengthy beach interlude in Kitano's great 1993 film Sonatine (as well as, I'm convinced, one breathtaking scene in Quentin Lee's Fall 1990). But on the other hand, the West Coast has the sunshine and, you know, the girls all get so tanned.