previously published on Cineuropa
At the beginning, there was the art tradition, originally Chinese but best known as Japanese, of the 8 views series of paintings. The eight elements are always the same: the returning ship, the evening snow, the weather clearing and so on, regardless of the exact variant. Biwa, the biggest freshwater lake in Japan, is the location and the “principal character” of the best known 8 views series. There have been attempts, usually from Western “orientalists” mesmerised by Japan, to invent romantic love stories behind every painting in the series. One such book came to Estonian filmmaker Marko Raat, who used it as a source of inspiration for his demanding but ultimately rewarding film 8 Views of Lake Biwa. The film premiered earlier this year at IFFR and was selected for the Parallels and Encounters programme at European Film Festival Palić.
In the opening part, Raat tries to establish the world of a lakeside fishing community prone to magical, irrational thinking and to build the characters that inhabit it, complete with their ways, customs and beliefs. He mostly relies on voice-over narrations in whispers and prayers that reveal some of the characters’ inner thoughts, which, along with meditative, poetic shots of the nature surrounding them, channels the mood of Terrence Malick’s 21st century body of work. Once the story starts unfolding, after a boat accident survived only by one fisherman and one teenage girl, Raat imposes the 8-chapter-structure, each of the chapters titled after one of the paintings, while the connections between the paintings and Raat's constructed narrative remain thin and light.
The plot itself revolves around a group of people that includes the local teacher (Tiina Tauraite, glimpsed in Rainer Sarnet’s The Invisible Fight), the gifted student Haneke (Elina Masing in her first big-screen role) and her father, the local fishing inspector and authority figure Roman (Hendrik Toompere), and their significant others and friends in the aftermath of the tragedy. That event takes them places and brings them back to the community, changing the relationships between its members and revealing more and more information about the wider world around them. Each plot point would make little sense if put through the filter of common logic, but they seem perfectly logical in this world where a ferry goes from Narva in Estonia via Vyborg in Russia all the way to Sapporo in Japan, where the largest wind farm in the world is planted in a lake and serves as a tourist attraction, where the gallery is a temple where widowed people find a statue that reminds them of their lost loved ones, and where a belief system, symbols and iconography combine the old faiths of Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity and Zen.
With its uneven but largely meditative pacing and its cryptic symbolism that can come across as over-bearing and nonsensical, nothing in 8 Views to Lake Biwa should work on its own, let alone all together, but it surprisingly does. This can be explained by the beauty of the film’s visual landscape, with Lake Peipsi dividing Estonia from Russia captured through the lens of cinematographer Sten Johan Lill, the eclecticism of Kristina Lõuk’s production design and Ret Aus' costumes, as well as the richness of the auditive landscape thanks to Jakob Juhkam’s neoclassical score and Karri Niinivara’s sound design.
The other reason is the acting of all the cast members, from leading to smaller roles, under the director’s guidance, at the limits of psychological realism, resulting in emotions convincingly flowing between the characters. Without it, 8 Views of Lake Biwa could have easily landed in new age pseudo-philosophy territory, peculiarity for its own sake, or in the realm of the silly fairytale. Instead, it is one of the most unique films of the year and maybe even a bona-fide masterpiece.
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