The Frog and the Water

 

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero 

The first radical gesture of The Frog and the Water is very simple: it removes speech. Not in a symbolic sense, but in a practical one. Buschi does not speak, and the film—with a certain elegance—stops treating it as a problem. 

From here, everything begins. 

Because The Frog and the Water is not a story of “overcoming,” nor of “growth” in any conventional narrative sense. Rather, it is an almost ironic demonstration that perhaps it is we—hyper-verbal, over-explanatory—who have a problem with existence. Buschi does not. Buschi moves through it. 

He does so like a Western character who has accidentally wandered into a European road movie: he does not conquer territories, he passes through them without appropriation. He seeks nothing, yet everything happens to him. His initial gesture—boarding the wrong bus—is the contemporary equivalent of walking into a dusty town without knowing why. 

The encounter with Hideo introduces a second shift: the film becomes a point of contact between two cultural systems that are never explained, let alone staged as “different.” Japan is not exotic, Germany is not normative: both are simply ways of being in the world. And in between lies a neutral territory where codes collapse. 

What is most striking is that communication—that thing cinema usually idolizes—is here entirely inefficient. And it works perfectly. Buschi and Hideo misunderstand each other, or rather: they understand without understanding. And this produces a surprisingly pure, almost technical form of relationship: being alongside one another without intrusion. 

There is an evident tenderness, but it is handled with a kind of structural restraint. The film never insists, never underlines, never “builds moments.” If something moves you, it is because it happens off to the side, while apparently nothing is happening at all. And it is precisely this dryness that makes it, paradoxically, far more engaging. 

Then there is the irony, which is essential. Not overt comedy, but a lightness that runs throughout: the very premise is slightly absurd (a young man gets lost and ends up on a Japanese tour), and the film knows it. Instead of justifying it, it accepts it. It asks the viewer for a small suspension of disbelief—and in return offers a rare freedom: not having to believe at all, but simply to follow. 

In the end, The Frog and the Water is exactly what it quietly promises to be: a small fable. But a fable without explicit moral, without pedagogy, without instruction. A fable that functions as a deviation—just like Buschi’s—and that, for once, does not lead anywhere in particular. 

And perhaps that is precisely the point: not to arrive, but to remain in transit. Like a frog that leaps without knowing exactly where it will land. Or like water, which does not need to choose a shape in order to exist. 

I have never been lost, but I have often found myself in places I have never been before.
— Mark Twain