Thermae Romae (2012)

directed by Hideki Takeuchi

Japan

108 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It is taking everything I have not to title this review "Hot Tub Time Machine".

Hey, did you know there was a movie where Hiroshi Abe plays an ancient Roman architect who gets sucked into a modern-day Japanese onsen through a portal inside a Roman bath, and takes the concepts he witnesses back to his own time, revolutionizing indoor plumbing and becoming a hero of the Empire? Neither did I, until yesterday, and by god am I glad I watched it immediately.

So that's basically the whole plot, with some padding here and there to stretch it out to 108 minutes. Abe plays Lucius, an architect who designs Roman baths but is kind of down on his luck, in an unhappy marriage, preoccupied with his job but otherwise essentially stagnant. When a whirlpool in the side of a public bath transports him inexplicably to the modern era, to a public bathhouse in Japan full of jolly old dudes who delight in his presence, he assumes he's somehow ended up in a far-flung province of the Roman Empire, and that everybody there must be slaves. But what he refers to as the "flat-faced tribe" has innovations so far ahead of his own people's technology that it puts him to great shame - he is brought to literal tears by his first taste of fruit-flavored milk - and when he returns to his own timeline, he gets to work bringing innovations from the modern day to the Romans. Of course, because he has no idea about automation or electronics, he assumes everything he sees that works with no apparent human intervention is powered by slaves toiling somewhere offscreen (blowing bubbles into the hot tub, stoking fires under the baths to keep them warm, playing an actual orchestra for background music, etc), and he uses those methods when he implements the modern-day technologies in his own time, so his success is kind of a double-edged sword. But this is not elaborated upon aside from the occasional visual gag.

To Thermae Romae's credit, it seems to be trying as hard as it possibly can not to be an isekai, but eventually Lucius meets Mami, a failing manga artist who's really, really into Fist of the North Star and works at a hot springs inn. It takes a while for the two to spend any real length of time together, because Lucius is always getting sucked back to Rome at the worst moments, and nobody believes Mami about him. But eventually she brushes up on her Latin and accidentally gets transported back to Rome along with Lucius. So it's a little bit of an isekai after all.

Perhaps because of the effort to not shoehorn this into typical genre conventions, one of the film's shortfalls is that it takes a really long time to feel like the actual storyline is kicking in. The plot is obvious from the start, and I can't say that I hated watching Hiroshi Abe explore modern bathhouses in bewilderment, but it takes until over halfway through the film for there to be any real conflict or expectations that Lucius must face. The parallels between him and Mami are interesting, though: both of them struggle in some way with being true to themselves, Lucius because it bothers him increasingly that he's cribbing his ideas from other people, and Mami because even though she's a good artist and extremely determined to make it in the business, her stories are too lackluster for a publisher to accept them, and it's looking like she might have to marry for convenience so her parents don't have to support her anymore. The two of them don't have any particular on-screen chemistry, but their romance is cute anyway, and the two characters compliment each other well.

The best part is how completely straight Abe plays it. Not much of this required any real suspension of disbelief, even though when you really think about it, the system of how Rome and Japan are portrayed onscreen is fairly complicated. In the scenes that take place in Rome, everybody speaks Japanese (which I guess we pretend is Latin - doesn't bother me, I watched Chernobyl) and for the most part they're not played by Japanese actors; there's a handful of more important characters who are, like the emperor Hadrian (in an instance of truly inspired casting, you may recognize Hadrian as the voice of Mewtwo in several Pokemon films) and a few of his higher-ups, but the whole idea here is that we are absolutely not supposed to believe any of the Romans are Japanese. Lucius is recognized as a foreigner when he's transported to modern Japan. Also, when Lucius is in the present day, his thoughts are mostly conveyed through internal monologues, but when he does speak out loud, he speaks Latin. It's... you really just kind of have to not worry about it. It's fine. Just go with it. And even though in the canon of the film, nobody in ancient Rome is actually Japanese, it didn't bother me at all to imagine there could be ethnically-Japanese citizens of the Empire, because we do know that the remains of people with East Asian features have been found within Rome. (Although if we're being technical, the people living in what would eventually become Japan at the time this film takes place were mostly concerned with getting good at farming and making really cool pots, and I doubt any of them came to live in the Empire, but hey, people have always known how to sail, nothing's impossible.)

Historical accuracy is not a huge concern when considering this film critically, because the whole thing is goofy and not meant to be a perfect depiction of ancient Roman life, but nevertheless I really enjoy it as somebody who is into history because I feel like it embodies the spirit of why history fascinates people so much. Everybody fantasizes about meeting somebody from thousands of years ago, which is why movies that use that as a plot point remain so interesting to me. And the backbone of Thermae Romae goes beyond the simple exchange of ideas between time periods and into the idea of cultural interchange in general - Lucius at first is struck by guilt about his ideas not being original, and feels like he's stealing from this mysterious tribe he's encountered, but by the end of the movie, a bunch of Mami's hot springs inn customers get transported back to Rome too, and enthusiastically help construct a bunch of ondol huts (houses that take advantage of the heat and warmth of a natural hot spring for healing and relaxation, without the actual bath component) for wounded soldiers. The message here feels like it's implying that cultural exchange is best when it's two-sided. I would hesitate before assuming any real-world philosophy from a movie where a Roman encounters a bidet and it practically sends him to another plane of existence, but the idea that everybody can learn something from everybody else and it's even better if all involved parties willingly exchange those ideas is a good takeaway.

So yeah, this is a movie that exists. At some point I realized the primary function of it may have been for looking at Hiroshi Abe almost entirely nude, but it's interesting even beyond that. At another point I also realized that this was made over ten years ago in Japan, very clearly depicts ancient Rome as a multi-ethnic society, and yet Americans still struggle enormously with the idea that ancient European societies weren't exclusively 100% white. I wouldn't consider this groundbreaking cinema - actually, yeah, I kind of would, it's a little bit incredible and I love it - but it's really fun and has a good conscience behind it. I really like how some of the scene transitions are marked by a guy singing opera alone in what appears to be the tokusatsu quarry.