“There is a Stone” in the cinema: instructions for idleness

Narrow stones with a smooth, rounded surface that can be gripped between the index finger and thumb are particularly suitable for bouncing on the water. When throwing, you should bend your knees and send the stones on their way to the water surface with a twist and a slight difference in height – otherwise they will sink after one or two hops.

This is childhood knowledge, but in “There Is a Stone” Yoshikawa (An Ogawa) and Doi (Tsuchi Kano), who meet at a river, exchange details about stone slipping. To be precise, he first stands on the other bank, waves, wades across the river and then asks on the other side in his wet clothes: “Did you say something?” And she, truthfully: “No.”

The scene caused loud laughter in the Berlinale forum, where Ota Tatsunari’s film was shown this year. Perhaps because “There Is a Stone” is not staged for comic effect, but rather this moment appears as casual as the entire production: meetings and farewells, play and seriousness, movement and standstill.

The young woman from Tokyo is traveling to another city. Actually, as she puts it herself, she is there to work – but you don’t see her working. Instead, she wanders around and lets herself drift. At the beginning she meets an older man and asks him a question: “Is there anything to see here, anything interesting?” Similar to how there is nothing to see in this place on a mountain above the city, where a castle is said to have once been , not much happens in this film on a conventional narrative level.

The majority of the plot takes place by the river, where the protagonist first plays soccer with a few children and then meets Doi. An encounter that is expressed in intuitive play with one another: they let the stones bounce, slide down a sandy slope, use two sticks to balance a third, and stack stones on top of each other. At dusk they look for a pebble that they lost in the riverbed. “Unfortunately, I didn’t understand your name,” the man would later write laconically in his diary.

Every cut sharpens the senses

The wonderful thing about “There Is a Stone” is that Ota, with his minimalist narration and staging, manages to shift the normative categories of our perception. What is interesting, beautiful, useful? The little information about the characters, the reduced dialogue, all of this is very deliberately placed: motivations and goals cannot be deciphered, and so the approach to this film is to understand it as a guide to idleness and, like the characters, to focus on the fleeting to let in the moment.

After the long shots, every pan of the camera and every cut sharpens the senses: for the sand on the sneakers, for the texture of the stones, and for the fact that the surroundings here are not a natural idyll, but rather cars drive past on a highway in the background.

Ota himself says that the inspiration for “There Is a Stone” came to him on an exactly the same afternoon by the river. “Why did we spend so much time collecting and examining stones? Why did I choose this stone and not that one? These are extremely trivial questions, but I felt I couldn’t ignore them.”

It is possible to associate these ideas with Far Eastern philosophy, such as the Taoist concept of Wow, which is best translated as “action through non-action”; or the anti-teachings of Zen. But you don’t need the theory to appreciate Ota’s film. So is there something to see here, something interesting? However. Stones and people and the freedom that lies in doing nothing.