Equal parts coming-of-age film with an S&M twist and exploration of the subjugation of women in Japan, Shinji Aoyama’s Backwater finds 17-year-old Toma (Masaki Suda) in the most tumultuous year of his life. While Toma is struggling to come to terms with his burgeoning sexuality through some awkward sexual rendezvous with his girlfriend, he comes to know more about his father’s violent sexual tendencies. ‘Accidentally’ witnessing  his father choke and beat his lover on one uncomfortable evening, and then hearing about them in gruesome detail from his mother, Toma is both visibly intrigued and disgusted. His torment is this: is he destined to become an unrepentant, violent abuser of women like his father?

Backwater is a deeply contextual film, set in late 1980s Japan at the tail-end of the Showa era – a period of enormous change that ultimately resulted in the reclaimed sovereignty of a democratic Japan that had previously been devastated by aggressive wartime destruction. While Toma is having dinner in a local restaurant, we bear witness to the news of the ailing health of Emperor Showa, who had become a positive symbol of Japan’s recovery and ongoing advancements into economic-powerhouse status.

Backwater also draws on the traditions of the Nikkatsu studio, which began producing soft-core pornography films with S&M lashings in an attempt to stave off bankruptcy in the 1970s. Nikkatsu took the ‘pink film’ market by storm, and its darkly comedic and uninhibited productions would go on to form a critically acclaimed era of Japanese filmmaking. Shot in the style of the Nikkatsu Roman Porno era and set in the same year as the final Nikkatsu film was released (1988), Backwater employs many of the classic Nikkatsu tropes, but with complementary narratives that are updated for the present day audience. Instead of showing the sex acts in glorified pink film tint, Backwater depicts the underlying motivations and horrors of perpetrating S&M acts on an unwilling participant. Instead of one-dimensional female characters that act as props, Backwater parades a cast of fully realised characters to illustrate the new era, of which the self-aware Toma is representative, at odds with the old Japan of wartime aggression, female subjugation and totalitarianism, which his father embodies.

On first watch, Aoyama’s Backwater appears somewhat confusing and heavy-handed, with unrelentingly obvious allusions to gender (eels and polluted rivers everywhere). But when you consider the task that Aoyama has set himself in attempting to deconstruct such massive contexts, you see all of the analogies and imagery in light of their necessity and nuance. Backwater goes to show, both in a larger sense and in relation to Toma’s story, that context is everything, and context is ever-changing. Be patient with this one, because it’s worth it.

4/5 stars