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.