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.