'SEA IS WATCHING': GEISHA WITH A HEART OF GOLD.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

JAPANESE GEISHA movies ain't what they used to be.

In their pre-to-postwar heydays, directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse offered up marvelously complex character studies of geishas, B-girls and other ladies of the night. They were followed by a more ferocious, confrontational generation that included the notorious Nagisa Oshima (``In the Realm of the Senses'') and ``The Sea Is Watching's'' own Kei Kumai, whose 1975 ``Sandakan-8'' was a bold examination of sexual exploitation during World War II.

Though formally beautiful, ``Sea Is Watching'' is remarkably trite in comparison to the great Japanese films on the subject. Set in an isolated, seaside red light district sometime during the pre-modernization Edo period, the film gently but firmly tells the story of the sisters in one particularly well-run brothel and their relationships - if that's what you can call them - with some of the semi-regular men in their lives. Basically, no real surprises are involved.

Our main heroine is O-Shin (Nagiko Tohno), a sweet little gal pressed into service by family tragedy, who has the unlucky habit of falling in love with her clients. The first of these is the disgraced young samurai Fusanosuke (Hidetaka Yoshioka). She and most of the other girls in the house mistake the naive lad's just-wanna-talk visits as evidence that he intends to marry O-Shin when his honor is restored. This shakes out in an entirely predictable way.

The other lady we get to know to any serious degree is Kikumo. She's played by the engaging Misa Shimizu as a wised-up type who can't help herself from being used by the no-account man she unaccountably loves.

Any of this sound familiar? It should, as ``The Sea Is Watching'' is built on the same blocks as every hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold story since time immemorial. This one adds the wrinkle of a big natural disaster near the end. It's meant as some kind of poetic extension of the film's title, but it plays like sheer deus ex machina on screen.

To many Japan's greatest filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa was not among the pantheon known for their ability to portray women. ``Sea Is Watching'' is taken from a script samurai and social issue master Kurosawa wrote before his death in 1998. Kumai has made the best, most respectfully visualized movie you'd imagine one could from the material. But ``The Sea Is Watching's'' essential shallowness could not be overcome.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

THE SEA IS WATCHING - Two and one half stars

(R: nudity, sex, violence, language)

Starring: Nagiko Tohno, Misa Shimizu, Masatoshi Nagase, Hidetaka Yoshioka.

Director: Kei Kumai.

Running time: 1 hr. 59 min.

Playing: Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Cecchi Gori Fine Arts, Beverly Hills.

In a nutshell: From a script by Akira Kurosawa, this lovely but trite film explores the lives of some prostitutes during Japan's Edo period.

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Photo:

Nagiko Tono, left, and Misa Shimizu play prostitutes in Samurai-era Japan in ``The Sea Is Watching.''