‘Yes, I Can't Swim': Tearful comedy avoids the shallows

Take it from someone who taught swimming at a summer camp, it’s a skill easily learned unless you’re deathly afraid of the water. Then the stuff kids usually master in a lesson or two, including blowing bubbles with your face in the lake, becomes a major challenge.

In Kensaku Watanabe’s “Yes, I Can't Swim,” this fear is also a source of laughs once its philosophy professor protagonist, Yuji Takanashi (Hiroki Hasegawa), signs up for beginning swimming lessons. Brainy, articulate and towering over his kind-but-strict instructor, Shizuka Usuhara (Haruka Ayase), he plaintively asks her, “What if I drown?” “I’ll save you,” she replies.

This role-reversal comedy, based on a novel by Hidemine Takahashi, stays funnier longer than I first thought possible. Hasegawa and Ayase, who played a married couple in the 2013 NHK drama series "Yae no Sakura," click as a comedy team, while the elderly ladies who are Yuji’s fellow students serve as an acid-tongued Greek chorus to the action.

But only so many gags can be extracted from Yuji’s struggle to learn the crawl stroke and Watanabe, who also wrote the script, segues to the serious reasons for his hero’s aquaphobia, while not totally losing the humorous vibe of the opening scenes. This laughs-to-tears story arc has long been a go-to strategy for Japanese films and its appearance in “Yes, I Can’t Swim” is as predictable as sunset following sunrise. The film never goes off the sentimental deep end, however.

Yuji, we learn, is divorced but still on speaking terms with his straight-talking ex, Miyako (Kumiko Aso). They had a son, Tomoya, who died in circumstances that, though not immediately explained, led to Yuji’s phobia — and what Miyako sees as his inability to respond emotionally to Tomoya’s death. “You never change,” she says. “I’m glad we broke up.”

Also, Yuji has been dating a single mom, the proprietor of a hair salon, who has a young son. But when Yuji’s phobia surfaces and her son is affected, she begins to have doubts about the relationship.

The solution for Yuji’s woes seems to lie in his guru-like instructor — “Swimming is rehab for the soul,” she tells him — but Shizuka is dealing with her own trauma. A near-fatal accident has left her with agoraphobia; the pool is her refuge from the scary world of dry land.

This is character development overkill, but Ayase, who often plays comically clueless types, stays firmly in charge as Shizuka while briskly dispensing swimming and life advice to her philosophical problem student. “Don’t fight the water,” she says. “Empty your mind.” A former star student athlete, Ayase has the toned physique and upright bearing of someone who lives and breathes her sport. When she speaks, we believe.

Also, Hasegawa, who has long worked on both sides of the comedy-drama divide, adeptly manages Yuji’s transition from comic swim-class dunce to tormented survivor of a life-changing tragedy.

One comparison is Kanji Furutachi’s metal-shop owner in the 2016 Koji Fukada masterpiece, “Harmonium.” Confronted with a similar tragedy, he howls with anguish from the depths of his being. Hasegawa’s reaction as Yuji is more muted, and to the film’s mainstream audience, more palatable. But “Yes, I Can't Swim” is a persuasive, full-throated endorsement of swimming as a stress reliever and, more importantly, life saver. Take it from this former lifeguard