Moving the Mountain

I keep having this idea for a movie- it's necessarily an international movie, since it would probably take place in Japan, and be mostly in Japanese, but it would be French in it's outlook. The French, as the saying goes, never resolve anything in their movies. And given what I want to present, resolution would just be pointless.

The basic idea is this- a Christian- one who certainly still believes, but is highly disaffected from his fellow Christians (gee, where would I get this idea?) goes to a small seaside resort in Japan. Being Japan, there's a mountain right near this resort. And during this Christian's stay, the god of the mountain comes down and asks to be baptized by the Christian.

I don't know enough about Shintoism to know how well it would work for Japanese audiences. Obviously, a lot of Christian audiences would have problems with it too.

But I do know enough about modernity to know that the god of any particular mountain might notice, after a while, that people are leaving his mountain. They go to the city, and get eaten up by modernity, and don't have children. It's just possible the mountain might feel bad about that, and look into what's been going on in the wider world.

The Christian would, of course, have even more experience with modernity- suffering from it, and likely not having any children either. Not to mention fed up to the gills with his fellow Christians imagining a false and hollow world of evangelism. I think of it like an algae bloom- they imagine this sudden change, many converts, but no infrastructure, no real place for anyone to live or practice.

So, obviously, the movie would be mostly a telling of something really big happening, and us mere humans doing little more than reacting. Because both the mountain, and God are bigger than us. But the trick of modernity is to consume us, while making us imagine we can move mountains and live like gods.