Happy Hour Third Draft

Complete third draft for Metrograph Journal.

It's a relatively common joke to point out that the five-and-a-half-hour epic Happy Hour (2015), Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s breakthrough film, has been affixed with a title denoting a substantially shorter time span. It is true that at least three scenes take place at bars, izakaya, or clubs, and involve drinking, but there is no single, delineated length of time where, in the most literal sense of the term, the four women at the center of the feature—divorced nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka), frustrated housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), married artistic events planner Fumi (Maiko Mihara), and the enigmatic Jun (Rira Kawamura)—can be said to experience unleavened bliss. Perhaps the closest moment is the opening scene: a funicular excursion to the top of a mountain adjacent to Kobe, the port city where they all live, cross paths, break apart, and come together again. Heavy fog shrouds the cityscape , and Jun comments that the overwhelming gray resembles the future of this quartet of 37-year-old women : a wry but light-hearted comment that, even as they turn their attention towards their shared lunches and plans for the next outing, will be tested and challenged. Every encounter they have afterwards will force them to examine their preconceptions , and Hamaguchi's exquisitely patient approach encourages the viewer to undertake this process in kind, forging a connection with the characters fostered by the intimacy of his approach.. The film was born from an improvisational workshop held by Hamaguchi where he discovered the actresses who would occupy the key four roles; none of them had prior cinematic acting experience, and for all of them this remains one of only one or two film credits to date. While almost every scene takes place from one or more of the women's perspectives, care is given to allow each significant character their own time to shine, serving as direct inspiration or counterpoint to the women's own struggles. Happy Hour is generally couched in an extended, contemplative register, utilizing a mostly temperate emotional tenor as the protagonists slowly navigate quotidian events on the border between realism and melodrama, most notably Jun's secretive divorce proceedings which comes close to tearing the previously close group of four apart. But Hamaguchi's film is exceptional for how its extended duration is used to cement its firm rootedness in the present, eschewing retrospection or more metaphysical concerns for an unwavering engagement with the material world and the relationships that develop over the span of about half a year. The effect of sitting with these narratives inviting rather than punishing, a sincere belief that the odd momentum that Hamaguchi's approach generates—alternating short ordinary moments of these women at their everyday duties with elongated sequences of unexpected encounters—is necessary to depict the full extent of his characters' experiences. Happy Hour opts for linearity within each given narrative perspective, a consistent sense of experience where, on the multiple occasions a character gives a long monologue about their past experiences : the viewer experiences their emotions in “real time,” observing their intonations and expressions and the reactions on the listeners’ faces. In such moments, Hamaguchi and his co-writers Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi (credited under the collective name Hatano Koubou) reveal an uncommon patience and a dedication to the beauty of the spoken word. These protracted scenes of dialogue chain together separate but consonant recollections into a single scene, linking them to separate narrative strands in a manner that only reveals their true significance much later. In one scene, for example, Akari and new acquaintance Kazama (Hajime Sakasho) discuss their respective marital separations, simultaneously influencing Sakurako's tentative romantic interest in the latter and Jun's own secretive divorce proceedings. In Happy Hour's centerpiece 30-minute sequence, beginning less than half an hour in, the artist’s workshop hosted by Ukai (Shuhei Shibata) launches the film into a series of modules on the possibilities of non-verbal communication. Attendees practice familiar and not so familiar “trust” exercises, such as two people standing up by using their backs to support each other, touching foreheads to transmit a thought, or aligning their center lines and moving circularly in tandem. One of Hamaguchi's most frequent formal gambits is a shot of a character looking directly into the camera, and it first appears in this film when Ukai and his partner are completely aligned, a match cut from the back of Ukai's head to his partner's face. The effect is to place the viewer in, if not a specific character's place, then a state of complete communion with the subject, used for both the women and the many other characters that come into their orbit. The immersion of this sequence finds its unanticipated complement in a similarly extended series of scenes immediately after Jun takes her leave from the film: young author Kozue (Reina Shiihashi) gives a timid reading of her short story, before Jun's emotionally manipulative biologist husband Kohei (Yoshitaka Zahana) is enlisted to fill in as Q&A moderator. Where the earlier sequence involved the four women as active participants in the workshop, here only two women are present, both notably sidelined as two "peripheral" figures who the viewer has been conditioned to dislike—the former for her possible infidelity with Fumi's husband, the latter for his refusal to grant Jun a divorce—take the center stage. It is true that, through much of Kozue's recitation, her prose seems to be tepid, underscored by a few choice shots of bored attendees, but Hamaguchi's insistence on dwelling here—and then providing a full-length, positive dissection from Kohei, an unexpected and putatively unlikable source —transforms it into an indelible experience, as Hamaguchi's durational approach draws parallels between this weak text and Ukai's more obviously compelling workshop. In turn, these moments are interwoven with Fumi's attempts to manage the event and Jun's dalliance at a club with Ukai, a realignment of the viewer's expectations that occurs simultaneously as the women's own reassessment of themselves and their quasi-adversaries. As is the case with so much of Happy Hour, the everyday is not so much elevated as revealed, a constant process of finding dignity in the little moments and the strength to grasp onto any opportunity to better one's own position. If the ending finds the quartet fractured and in an uncertain state, it still faces the future with a renewed capacity for hope: the sun shines bright.

Happy Hour Second Draft

Complete second draft for Metrograph Journal.

It's a relatively common joke to point out that the five-and-a-half-hour epic Happy Hour (2015), Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s breakthrough film, has been affixed with a title denoting a substantially shorter time span. It is true that at least three scenes take place at bars, izakaya, or clubs, and involve drinking, but there is no single, delineated length of time where, in the most literal sense of the term, the four women at the center of the feature—divorced nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka), frustrated housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), married artistic events planner Fumi (Maiko Mihara), and the enigmatic Jun (Rira Kawamura)—can be said to experience unleavened bliss. Perhaps the closest moment is the opening scene: a funicular excursion to the top of a mountain adjacent to Kobe, the port city where they all live, cross paths, break apart, and come together again. Heavy fog shrouds the cityscape, and Jun comments that the overwhelming gray resembles the future of this quartet of 37-year-old women, a wry but light-hearted comment that, even as they turn their attention towards their shared lunches and plans for the next outing, will be tested and challenged. Every encounter they have afterwards will come in new, unanticipated forms, and, for the viewer, the act of witnessing is synonymous with the time it takes to understand how each moment fits into the characters' respective approaches to living, a process which Hamaguchi encourages with exquisite patience. The film was born from an improvisational workshop held by Hamaguchi where he discovered the actresses who would populate the key four roles; none of them had prior cinematic acting experience, and for all of them this remains one of only one or two credits to date. While almost every scene takes place from one or more of the women's perspectives, care is given to allow each significant character their own time to shine, serving as direct inspiration or counterpoint to the women’s own struggles, never treated as subordinate or unimportant but instead as an equal moment of revelation. Like a number of films on the contemporary festival circuit, Happy Hour is generally couched in an extended, contemplative register, utilizing a mostly even-keeled emotional tenor as the protagonists slowly navigate quotidian events. But Hamaguchi's film is exceptional for its firm rootedness in the present, eschewing retrospection or more metaphysical concerns for an unwavering engagement with the material world and the relationships that develop over the span of about half a year. Backstories and past events do play a significant role, but Happy Hour never resorts to signposted flashbacks, voiceover, or other such devices that overtly disrupt the forward flow of time. Hamaguchi instead opts for linearity within each given narrative perspective, a consistent sense of experience where, on the multiple occasions a character gives a long monologue about their past experiences, the viewer experiences their emotions in “real time,” observing their intonations and expressions and the reactions on the listeners’ faces. These are, of course, not unique concepts, but the way that Hamaguchi and his co-writers Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi (credited under the collective name Hatano Koubou) chain together these moments into a single, extended scene and link them to separate narrative strands—like in a bravura scene where Akari and Kazama (Hajime Sakasho) discuss their respective marital separations, simultaneously influencing both Sakurako's tentative romantic interest in the latter and Jun's own secretive divorce proceedings —reveals an uncommon dedication to the beauty of the spoken word. But Hamaguchi does not merely rely on dialogue to convey these connections between his protagonists. In Happy Hour's signature 30-minute sequence, beginning less than half an hour in, the artist’s workshop hosted by Ukai (Shuhei Shibata) launches the film into a series of modules on the possibilities of non-verbal communication, as practiced through such exercises as two people standing up by using their backs to support each other, touching foreheads to transmit a thought, or aligning their center lines and moving circularly in tandem. One of Hamaguchi's most frequent formal gambits in his filmography is a shot of a character looking directly into the camera, and it first appears in this film when Ukai and his partner are completely aligned. The effect is to place the viewer in, if not a specific character's place, then a state of complete communion with the subject, used for both the women and the many other characters that come into their orbit. This sequence finds its unanticipated complement in a similarly extended series of scenes immediately after Jun takes her leave from the film: young author Kozue (Reina Shiihashi) gives a timid reading of her short story, before Jun's erstwhile biologist husband Kohei (Yoshitaka Zahana) is enlisted to fill in as a Q&A moderator. Where the earlier sequence involved the four women as active participants in the workshop, here only two women are present, both notably sidelined as these two figures who the viewer has been conditioned to dislike—the former for her possible infidelity with Fumi's husband, the latter for his refusal to grant Jun a divorce—take the center stage. It is true that, through much of Kozue's recitation, her prose seems to be tepid, underscored by a few choice shots of bored attendees, but Hamaguchi's insistence on sitting with so much of it—and then providing a full-length, positive dissection from an unexpected and putatively unlikable source—transforms it into an indelible experience. In turn, these moments are interweaved with Fumi's attempts to manage the event and Jun's dalliance at a club with Ukai, more obviously "important" narrative beats which nevertheless are treated with exactly the same amount of care, a realignment of the viewer's expectations that occurs at the same time as the women's own reassessment of themselves and their quasi-adversaries. As is the case with so much of Happy Hour, the everyday is not so much elevated as revealed, a constant process of finding dignity in the little moments and the strength to grasp onto any opportunity to better one's own position. If the ending finds the quartet fractured and in an uncertain state, it still faces the future with a renewed capacity for hope: the sun shines bright.

Happy Hour First Draft

Complete first draft for Metrograph Journal.

In its own way, the title of Happy Hour, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's breakthrough film, is as much an enigma as that of his latest masterwork Evil Does Not Exist. It's a relatively common joke to point out that this five-and-a-half-hour epic—longer than all but the most the most generous of establishments would allow—has been affixed with a label denoting a substantially shorter time span. When applied to the actual contents of the film, the appellation seems even more bewildering. It is true that at least three scenes take place at bars, izakaya, or clubs and involve drinking, but there is no single, delineated length of time in either runtime or narrative time where, in the most literal sense of the term, the four women at the core of Happy Hour—divorced nurse Akari (Sachie Tanaka), frustrated housewife Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), married artistic events planner Fumi (Maiko Mihara), and the enigmatic Jun (Rira Kawamura)—can be said to experience unleavened bliss. Perhaps the closest moment is, indeed, the opening scene: a funicular excursion to the top of a mountain adjacent to Kobe, the port city where all of them live, cross paths, break apart, and come together yet again. Heavy fog prevents visibility, and Jun comments that it resembles the future of this quartet of 37-year-old women, a wry but light-hearted comment that, even as they turn their attention towards their shared lunches and plans for the next outing, will be tested and challenged; every encounter they have afterwards will come in new, unanticipated forms. For Hamaguchi and his cast, the widespread recognition that Happy Hour received surely counted as an unexpected turn. The film was born from an acting workshop featuring the seventeen actors who would populate the key roles; none of them had prior cinematic acting experience, and for the vast majority of them this remains one of their only credits to date. These origins speak to the unfathomable depth to the proceedings: while almost every scene takes place from one or more of the women's perspectives, care is given to allow each key character their own time to shine, often at unexpected junctures or to serve as direct inspiration or counterpoint to the women's own struggles, never treated as subordinate or unimportant but instead as an equal moment of revelation. Happy Hour's treatment of time is especially pertinent within the context of this Passages program, where it is in both fitting and unusual company. Like the films of Edward Yang, Hirokazu Koreeda, Agnès Varda, Theo Angelopoulos, and Apichatpong Weerasthakul, it is generally couched in an extended, contemplative register, utilizing a mostly even-keeled emotional tenor to slowly accumulate quotidian events. But unlike those works, which are either explicitly about retrospection—That Day on the Beach, Still Walking, The Beaches of Agnès—or reflecting upon different states of life and being—Eternity and a Day, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—Hamaguchi's film is firmly rooted in the present, principally concerned with concrete actions and the relationships that develop over the span of about a year. Backstories and past events do play a significant role, but Happy Hour never resorts to signposted flashbacks, voiceover or other such devices that overtly disrupt the continual forward flow of time. Hamaguchi instead opts for linearity within each given narrative perspective, a consistent sense of experience where, on the multiple occasions a character gives a long monologue about their past experiences, the viewer experiences their emotions in "real time," observing their intonations and expressions and the reactions on the listeners' faces. These are, of course, not unique concepts, but the way that Hamaguchi and his co-writers Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi (credited under the collective name Hatano Koubou) chain together these moments into a single, extended scene, only breaking them up in order to link them to separate narrative strands happening simultaneously, reveals an uncommon patience and a dedication to the beauty of the spoken word. But Hamaguchi's is not only a talking cinema. In Happy Hour's signature 30-minute sequence, beginning less than half an hour in, the artist's workshop hosted by Ukai (Shuhei Shibata) launches the film into a series of modules on the possibilities of non-verbal communication, as practiced through such exercises as two people standing up by using their backs to support each other, touching foreheads to transmit a thought, or aligning their center lines and moving circularly in tandem. Happy Hour is all about this idea of communication and alignment: one of Hamaguchi's most frequent formal gambits is a shot of a character looking directly into the camera, and it first appears in this film when Ukai and his partner are completely aligned. The effect is to place the viewer in, if not a specific character's place, then a state of complete communion with the subject. Likewise, the movement from person to person between scenes, even as they spend long stretches of time apart, creates an implicit dialogue, as the women often find greater success in understanding each other's unique circumstances as they spend time apart. This sequence finds its unanticipated complement in a similarly extended series of scenes immediately after Jun takes her leave from the film: young author Kozue (Reina Shiihashi) gives a timid reading of her short story, before Jun's erstwhile biologist husband Kohei (Yoshitaka Zahana) is enlisted to fill in as Q&A moderator for the shirking Ukai. Where the earlier sequence involved the four women as active participants in the workshop, here only two women are present, both notably sidelined as these two figures who the viewer has been conditioned to dislike—the former for her possible infidelity with Fumi's husband, the latter for his refusal to grant Jun a divorce—take the center stage. It is true that, through much of Kozue's recitation, her prose seems to be tepid, underscored by a few choice shots of bored attendees, but Hamaguchi's insistence on sitting with so much of it—interweaving it through other, more obviously "important" narrative beats and then providing a full-length, positive dissection from an unexpected and putatively unlikable source—transforms it into an indelible experience. As is the case with so much of Happy Hour, the quotidian is not so much elevated as revealed, a constant process of finding dignity in the little moments and the strength to grasp onto any opportunity to better one's own position. If the ending finds the quartet fractured and in an uncertain state, it still faces the future with a renewed capacity for hope: the sun shines bright.

Robin Campillo

1. 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017)
2. Red Island (2023)

1. 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017)
2. Red Island (2023)

Red Island First Draft

Complete first draft for Slant Magazine.

It can be easy to read too much into the whims of the film festival landscape, especially as to why a particular notable film was not selected. That being said, Robin Campillo's Red Island is surely one of the most bafflingly, instantly memory-holed films in recent memory. In 2017, Campillo had seemed to be a director on the doorstep of widespread recognition. At that year's Cannes, his 120 BPM (Beats per Minute), a wonderful film about the French ACT UP movement in the 1990s—equal parts taut activist procedural and tender relationship drama—won the Grand Prix and had seemed destined for the Palme d'or. Pitched at the mainstream yet still possessing Campillo's precise eye and committed politics, his breakthrough as a major auteur seemed assured. Now, with his follow-up six years later, Red Island failed to be selected by Cannes and premiered to little fanfare in French cinemas shortly afterwards. For better or worse, this suits Red Island's general focus on fantasies slipping away. It begins with one such daydream, a world of miniature buildings and puppet-faced men facing off against a young, masked girl. This is quickly revealed to be a visualization of the superhero Fantômette, the heroine of a long-running French book series, and a particular obsession of Campillo's stand-in: Thomas (Charlie Vauselle). The film's setting is Military Base 181 on Madagascar, specifically from the years 1970-1972, a period after the island's independence from French colonial rule in 1960 but while the military was still allowed to stay on their bases and work with the local troops. The unusual chyron establishes something of the odd paradox the film finds itself in: it is at once lackadaisical and urgent, a period of relaxation with a clear eye on how swiftly everything will end. Not that Thomas, peering out from the army crate that he often retreats to, sees this incoming loss of his home. Instead, his gaze is fixed upon the adults around him, particularly his airman father Robert (Quim Gutierrez) and loving mother Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), along with his burgeoning friendship with classmate and fellow Fantômette-lover Suzanne (Cathy Pham). Though time is marked throughout until the final day before the troops' departure—which takes up about a third of the two-hour film—including in a particularly telling Christmas scene, complete with Santa emerging from a paratrooper plane, Campillo's film is diffuse, caught between its youthful perspective and more vast questions of identity and France's place in a locale it has subjugated for too long. Most notably, an officer named Bernard is left by his homesick wife and begins a series of flirtations with various local women. This eventually leads to what may be seen as the film's ultimate gambit: Red Island is told from the perspective of the white family members until its final fifteen minutes, when Miangaly (Amely Rakotoarimalala), Bernard's girlfriend, has a conversation in Malagasy with a native soldier, before leaving the base and impulsively joining a celebration of the release of imprisoned protestors. The ending is purposefully hopeful, in a way that, while commendable, smooths over the ambiguous nature of the family's final interactions: hints of an impending divorce upon their return to France, the genderbending sequence of Thomas lurking in a Fantômette costume at night. If Red Island is ultimately too divided in its interests to entirely function as either a grand statement on French troops in Madagascar or as a precise portrait of childhood in a strange place, it is still able to summon a certain evocative feeling. Trading in 120 BPM's Scope framing for Academy ratio, Campillo plays up the surreality of certain moments: parachuters in a jagged line over the hills of Madagascar, the family's slow-motion efforts to shoo hornets out of the bathroom, all of the absurdly juvenile but pleasingly handmade Fantômette sequences. Most effective of all is a telling scene where military families and locals alike watch a 16mm print of Abel Gance's Napoléon on the beach, projected onto a sheet in front of the waves. As Napoléon fights a storm while Robespierre's radicals take control of the National Assembly, it acts as a synecdoche for another era of French rule, this one ending before our eyes.

Only the River Flows First Draft

Complete first draft for Screen Slate SF Bay Area.

In the span of just four years and three features, Wei Shujun has vaulted himself to the upper echelons of exciting young mainland Chinese directors. His feature-length directorial debut, Striding Into the Wind, was initially scheduled for a berth in the pandemic-cancelled 2020 edition of Cannes, and he returned to the festival the following year with Directors' Fortnight selection Ripples of Life. Both are loose films à clef about filmmaking, the former a light treatment of his frustrations in film school and the latter an ambitious omnibus of stories set in and around the preparations for a misbegotten location film shoot. Even given the differences in scale, they register as self-consciously sprawling works, running more than two hours and ruled by their characters' tempestuous emotions. With Only the River Flows, Wei has unexpectedly pivoted in an entirely different direction. An adaptation of a novel by the legendary Chinese writer Yu Hua (most famous in cinema for penning the source material for Zhang Yimou's To Live), it quickly establishes itself as a relatively (by Wei's standards) tight 100-minute genre exercise: in Jiangdong Province circa 1995, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds himself at multiple crossroads: his wife is about to give birth to their first child, his unit is about to be moved into an abandoned movie theater, with the majority of the desks set up on stage, and he is up for a possible merit award. In the midst of this upheaval comes a mysterious series of murders, which in turn uncover revelations about the rural city's inhabitants that may or may not be related to the crimes at hand. Like Wei's first two films, Only the River Flows relies less on strict plotting than a pervasive mood of dissatisfaction and simmering confusion at the state of things. Unlike those works, that sensation is immediately invoked by the texture: shot on 16mm—reportedly the first film shot on celluloid in mainland China in years—by Chengma Zhiyuan, the format is used both for the beautiful haze it lays onto the proceedings and its instant evocation of the time period and its contemporary policiers. As Ma Zhe trudges further into the murk of mystery, Wei's narrative unspools into a kaleidoscope of surreal and metacinematic images and motifs: ping-pong balls, tape recorders, burning film reels. Its resolution inevitably leaves many of these lingering threads unresolved, but what registers most is Wei's continually evolving vision of China's recent ways of living, entirely distinct from his prior films' generic concerns but just as beguiling.