Ryūsuke Hamaguchi:
A Crack Where the Light Gets In

The emotions in Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s films catch you unawares. They build slowly. As seemingly ordinary interactions – gatherings of family and friends, chats with work colleagues, attendance at the theatre or public meetings – placidly proceed, we may not even be entirely aware of the subterranean movement and evolution of these feelings.

When you do find yourself shedding a tear or trembling with dread before one of his movies, it is rarely tied directly to a moment of drama or catharsis, such as a confrontation or a confession. Rather, it would seem that a crack has opened up at some almost indiscernible point of the film’s unfolding, and eventually – when you least expect it – the emotion wells up through it.

It happens that way for spectators, and also for the characters. In the third episode of his (so far) best film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021), two women, Natsuko (Fusako Urabe) and Aya (Aoba Kawai), enter into a strange but delightful game of role-play. Midway in her passage up a train station escalator, Natsuko spots – travelling in the opposite direction – Aya, whom she recognises as the long-lost school friend with whom she experienced her first, truly passionate love. Both of them reverse the path of their movement and begin a conversation that extends over the afternoon.

It takes some time for Aya to let on that she is not, in fact, the person that Natsuko assumes her to be. Rather than let their encounter terminate so awkwardly, Aya proposes that she will pretend to be that person, so that Natsuko can express her feelings. And later, back at the station, just before parting, Natsuko makes the reverse proposal to Aya.

By the time that imaginary dialogue is over, we sense that something has genuinely shifted, some trauma or regret has been, at least for the moment, spontaneously worked through. The specific outcomes of this improvised therapy session are left in suspense, but characters and viewers alike experience the unmistakable wave of an unbottled emotion.

Incidents and moments of this kind happen regularly in Hamaguchi’s films. The gestures that characters make, the words they speak, the interactions they have are generally out-of-phase with the results and realisations they eventually unleash. The influence of John Cassavetes (on whom Hamaguchi wrote his university thesis) is evident – albeit completely transformed in a different social and cultural context – in surprising moments of impulsive or excessive behaviour.

The gentle Ryohei (Masahiro Higashide) in Asako I & II (2018) is startled, while his hands are plunged into the sink washing dishes, to receive a full-on hug from his quietly conflicted domestic partner, Asako (Erika Karata). Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka), the harried public relations consultant in Evil Does Not Exist (2023), finds himself, as he pilots a car, suddenly shouting at his colleague, Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani): “Why don’t you quit your job?” – a displaced projection since, as we later learn, it’s he who must face the necessity and challenge of changing his life.

And when the final line of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya – “We shall rest” – is transmitted from a theatre stage via Korean Sign Language by Yoo-na (Park Yu-rim) in the penultimate scene of Drive My Car (2021), all the pain and heartache that the various characters in the film have felt, and only fitfully expressed, finds an unexpected avenue of release.

Drive My Car may be the film that decisively introduced Hamaguchi to many viewers around the world, but his career had long been a work-in-progress before that triumph, including an intensive three-year period (2011-2013) making documentaries in collaboration with Ko Sakai. (Hamaguchi credits that experience with teaching him how to really listen for when it’s the voice, rather than the body, that signals a crack.)

In his student days at University of Tokyo in the late 1990s, Hamaguchi became a committed cinephile in a culture where (as he professed to Cineaste interviewer Eugene Kwon) there is an emphasis on “seeing details within the frame and also paying close attention to sound exterior to the frame” – a practice that he characterises as “thoroughly watching”. That methodology largely derives from the work of a celebrated and still very active Japanese critic who can be considered Hamaguchi’s first master: Shiguéhiko Hasumi (born 1936).

During Hamaguchi’s subsequent enrolment in Tokyo University of the Arts, he had another decisive encounter with a teacher who would greatly influence him: filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, for whom he would later collaborate on the screenplay of Wife of a Spy (2020). In fact, there is a shared lineage at play here, since Kurosawa – alongside Shinji Ayoyama, Masayuki Suo and others – had previously been Hasumi’s devoted student in the 1980s, and has kept that faith ever since.

Hamaguchi’s work, we could say, oscillates between these two masters – sometimes from film to film, sometimes within a single film. Whenever his films move toward generic elements of tension or horror, and deploy a more expansive repertoire of expressionistic metaphors, the Kurosawa influence is especially prominent. Evil Does Not Exist marks, to date, the most sustained instance of this tendency. It has more in common with Bright Future (2003) or To the Ends of the Earth (2019) than with the legacies of Yasujirō Ozu or Kenji Mizoguchi as illuminated by Hasumi.

Even when Hamaguchi veers toward comedy and/or romance formulae, as in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy or the more treacly Asako I & II, Kurosawa’s sly negotiation of these conventions (as in his episode for the 2022 TV series Modern Love Tokyo) is evident as a model.

I confess to preferring the more everyday side of Hamaguchi’s sensibility. A special motif stands out: the banal act of two people taking leave of each other’s company, and waving goodbye. Has anybody ever filmed this mundane interaction so perceptively as Hamaguchi? These scenes are not the seismic separations we see dotted through the filmography of, say, Philippe Garrel – but, all the same, they harbour an insistent doubt, a worry, as if one or both characters in this dance are wondering: will I ever see this person again?

That is, after all, exactly what Baku (the other half of Masahiro Higashide’s double role) does in Asako I & II: after an ordinary farewell, he disappears for years. And, more regularly in Hamaguchi’s films, nothing is more socially catastrophic than the person who is the first to announce their abrupt exit from a communal dinner table: within moments, the entire room is sure to empty out, every other member of the event suddenly disoriented or embarrassed.

Unlike Ozu, Hamaguchi does not concentrate on families. He prefers other, less usual groupings: friends who attend a workshop or a book reading together (Happy Hour, 2015), actors gathered for a theatre rehearsal (Drive My Car), or citizens assembled for a public meeting (Evil Does Not Exist). As in the work of his friend and contemporary, Matías Piñeiro, Hamaguchi enjoys playing with the resonances that can emerge from a text embedded in the fiction, such as the Chekhov plays referenced in Asako and Drive My Car. Like Kelly Reichardt (whose films he admires) or Dan Sallitt, Hamaguchi likes to patiently show people in the process of working, or immersed in their daily rounds (witness the wood sawing and chopping in Evil).

A less likely comparison, however, gets us closest to the heart of Hamaguchi’s method. Like Richard Linklater, Hamaguchi is especially dexterous at staging private moments in public settings, from bus rides to workplace smoking breaks, from theatre foyers to children’s playgrounds. For it is in these settings that everyday life begins to come unglued – and that is a crack to be wholeheartedly welcomed.

There’s no simple or conventional cause-and-effect mechanism guiding these narratives. Hamaguchi himself puts it well in one of his splendid essays: there is a difference between the significance of an initial encounter – with a person, a landscape or a work of art – and the shock of complete recognition that will, hopefully at some later point, occur. His films unfold in the gap, the delay, between encounter and shock, event and affect. It takes time for meanings to be grasped, and for feelings to break the surface of everyday routine.

For that to happen, the course of events must not be entirely smooth: as screenwriter-critic Yvette Bíró argues in her brilliant book Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (2008), narratives require drift, pause and digression, if they hope to excavate the subterranean depths of consciousness and emotion.

No film illustrates this principle better than Evil Does Not Exist. A set-up that evokes the upcoming, Erin Brockovich-type battle between ‘glamping’ (glamorous camping) developers and the inhabitants of rural Harasawa never makes it to the next, logical plot-point of that struggle. It deliberately loses its way by focusing on characters (Takahashi and Mayuzumi) who seemed, on first appearance, relatively peripheral to the drama.

To master such a narrative form is no easy feat. A particular skill is required, and it’s not the sort of technique one can learn from how-to books or traditional filmmaking schools. In Hamaguchi’s case, it is a matter of subtly signalling the potential cracks in a character or situation – the unannounced moments, the slight turns or inflections, when things under the surface begin to shift.

The more we rewatch Hamaguchi’s films, the more we become attuned to the special language of image, sound and acting gesture that he has developed in order to express his view of individuals embedded in a social, interactional framework.

Take, for instance, his penchant for shots of actors looking (or very nearly looking) right into the camera lens. It’s a device that always indicates an intensification of the characters’ inner emotions, and the likely imminence of some straight-shooting truth-telling – however difficult or embarrassing – between them. Or the eloquent way that, through the careful conjunction of camera position and mise en scène choreography of performers, we arrive at the view of a person as seen from the back: something is always bubbling up in these moments when a body is suddenly still, and we can no longer read the expressions on a face.

Some viewers will rightly detect the imprint of Ozu on such depictions. Hamaguchi borrows these devices from Ozu and customises them in his own way, but he insists equally on the understanding of Ozu which he imbibed from Hasumi. In the latter’s magisterial 1983 book Directed by Yasujirō Ozu (now available from University of California Press in an excellent English translation by Ryan Cook), we can read, for instance, that Ozu underlines a change-to-come in the lives of his characters by contriving to show them, at key moments, simply standing side by side and silently looking out at some shared horizon of interest. And it is on just such an arrangement of bodies that the final shot of Asako I & II suspends us.

There is an enormous yearning for contact – physical and emotional – in Hamaguchi’s films. The hugging embraces his characters sometimes arrive at, after various psychological obstacles have been cleared away, register among the most glorious moments of his work. One gets the sense that Hamaguchi longs to take his modern characters beyond the point of polite repression that defined (and gave much poignancy to) the interpersonal dramas in Ozu or Mikio Naruse.

Referring to another concept from Hasumi – the provocative notion that what Ozu created was deliberately not authentically ‘Japanese’ in many of its particulars – Hamaguchi stages shocks and outpourings of emotion that are, to some extent, his fantasy or wish. As he told Carlos Aguilar of the Los Angeles Times: “In general, Japanese people wouldn’t say some of the dialogue in my movies. In Japanese culture, expressing your emotions in a very honest and straightforward manner is not common … At the same time, letting the characters say something that’s very honest and direct is something that’s necessary for me in my films.” He wants his non-Cassavetes characters to inhabit a Cassavetes universe!

But there is also a flip side to this yearning: fear of touching, a dread caused by the implacable otherness of any other person. Friend or foe? Encounters often carry an ambiguous aura in his work; excessively close, sustained contact can create its own ills, as we see in Asako I & II. Sometimes, keeping a respectful distance between proximate bodies takes on a quasi-sacred aura.

In the intriguing, 50-minute Touching the Skin of Eerieness (2013), two teenagers, under the watchful eye of their teacher, practise a slow dance in which they strive not to touch each other. In Evil Does Not Exist, the human and deer populations of the village often gaze at each other from afar – and, as we learn, it’s best not to approach this animal when it has already received wounding gunshot from a hunter.

Of all Hamaguchi’s films, the 317-minute Happy Hour delves deepest into this ambivalence. The director, no doubt inspired by Jacques Rivette’s epic Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971), gives free rein to his impulse to document workshop situations (on which Eerieness, Drive My Car and Evil Does Not Exist offer diverse variations). There is an extended sequence in which the enigmatic Ukai (Shuhei Shibata), pitching his sessions somewhere between performance art and New Age healing, leads participants to, at some moments, purely sense the movements and vibrations of each other’s bodies; and, at other moments, to enter into potentially uncomfortable or distressing zones of contact (such as listening up-close at somebody’s stomach).

The bodies in the workshop that successfully stand up together while connected back-to-back are echoed later by the briefly uninhibited dancing of Akari (Sachie Tanaka) – at that moment injured and dependent on crutches! – amidst the pressing crowd in a nightclub. But the problems of sensing what another person thinks and feels, and the many mistakes made on this terrain of intimacy, fill the film from the first to the fifth hour.

Given this to-and-fro between connection and disconnection, it’s little wonder that, when Hamaguchi strays into the arena of Rohmerian comedy of manners as he does in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, an entire episode is devoted to the modern-day etiquette of when (and why) a university professor needs to keep their office “door wide open” (the title of this tale) while consulting with present or past students.

There is a philosophical, existential dimension to this duality of touch and distance in Hamaguchi, but also the resonance of social conditions: the many devastations wrought by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 (which interrupts the plot of Asako I & II), and the levels of alienation introduced during pandemic and post-pandemic times (which figure glancingly in Drive My Car and centrally in Evil Does Not Exist).

The intent of Hamaguchi’s use of social issues in his fictions fluctuates from film to film: while in Eerieness and Asako, factors of landscape and environment (especially the element of water) serve, to some extent, as expressionistic extensions of characters’ emotions, Evil Does Not Exist foregrounds ecological issues … until a thoroughly ambiguous finale overturns the interpretive tables.

More usually, even the notion of evil, when it is explicitly discussed by the characters, has a more humble, everyday, Rohmerian ring in Hamaguchi. For he, too, makes ‘moral tales’ about the sometimes impulsive choices people make – and the consequences, positive or negative, of those choices. Like Rohmer, Hamaguchi investigates the paradox of seeming predestination (signalled by the many flagrant coincidences in his narratives) and free will: if everything is miraculously determined in advance, can we truly be held responsible for our actions?

Hamaguchi has announced that he intends to “continue experimenting with smaller projects, finding discoveries that way.” His latest film, All of a Sudden (2026), was shot in France. We can be fairly certain that it will take us on another spin of the wheel of fortune and fantasy – or, as the Japanese title of Wheel more exactly has it, chance and imagination.

Capsule Notes on 18 Hamaguchi Films

Like Nothing Happened (2003)
After University of Tokyo studies and film-club initiation into cinephilia, Hamaguchi shot a precocious feature on Super-8 and with post-sync dialogue, later shortened to 43 minutes. The youthful ensemble cast (including himself) enacts a rambling, Nouvelle Vague-style chronicle of hanging out, going to a horse race, and negotiating romantic relationships.

Solaris (2007)
The first Hamaguchi film to derive from a creative workshop. Kiyoshi Kurosawa set his students at Tokyo University of the Arts the assignment of adapting Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris; Hamaguchi won and shot it with his classmates. Due to copyright restriction, it can be screened only under special conditions.

Passion (2008)
Hamaguchi’s graduation work was his first feature to receive distribution and garner public attention in Japan. The influence of John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970) looms large over this tale of neurotic, sometimes violent men and their conflicted relationships. Filmed in a gritty, harsh, claustrophobic style that Hamaguchi would mostly abandon thereafter.

I Love Thee for Good (2009)
An hour-long piece for TV that, in its mix of comedy and drama, offers a foretaste of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (including actor Aoba Kawai). It interweaves several strands: a pensive woman about be married, the ex-lover with whom she has possibly become pregnant, and a rock band rehearsing.

The Depths (2010)
Hamaguchi’s most conventional film, a co-venture of Tokyo University of the Arts and Korean Academy of Film Arts, sets up the tense triangle of a photographer, a jilted groom and a gay hustler. Although the material leans toward the urban crime-thriller genre, the treatment concentrates on mood and character psychology.

The Sound of Waves (2011)
The first of four documentaries, all co-directed by Ko Sakai, made in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan. The filmmakers are often visible, and the manner of capturing the testimonies of survivors is formal and non-invasive – a respectful approach that invites trust and intimacy.

Voices from the Waves: Kesennuma (2013)
The two ‘voices’ instalments of the Waves series concentrate on specific areas of coastal Japan hit by the natural disaster of 2011. Hamaguchi has said he came to appreciate the complexity of vocal utterance, and the need to really listen to people, through this experience of documentation.

Voices from the Waves: Shinchimachi (2013)
The other region-specific entry in the Waves series continues the careful framing, recording and editing of personal testimonies of tsunami survivors. An everyday sense of humour and reserves of folk wisdom characterise even the most horrifying tales of death, material loss and traumatic panic conveyed by the speakers.

Storytellers (2013)
The final entry in this documentary series broadens the framework: no longer exclusively tied to tsunami testimonials, Hamaguchi and Ko (whose own work has continued in this regional and archival vein) explore the tradition of verbal storytelling and its vital significance in the reconstruction of lived history.

Intimacies (2012)
Hamaguchi made this with students at ENBU Seminar, a cinema and theatre school in Tokyo. It exists in two cuts, 136 and 255 minutes. Mixing fiction and documentary, it depicts the preparation of a play, its performance and its aftermath. As often in his work, language is a key subject.

Touching the Skin of Eerieness (2013)
Hamaguchi’s films often foreground rehearsals and performances of various kinds. In this 54-minute piece, two teenage schoolboys obsessively practise a ‘no touch’ dance that perfectly captures the ambivalent mix of homoerotic desire and primal fear which drives the enigmatic plot. The atmosphere of unspoken dread is indebted to Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Happy Hour (2015)
This 317-minute project, which marked Hamaguchi’s breakthrough on the international festival circuit, emerged from a workshop with nonprofessional actors in Kobe. It signalled a general shift in his work from men to women as the central dramatic focus, as four friends in their late 30s face relationship crises and lifestyle shifts.

Heaven is Still Far Away (2016)
This 38-minute film – “my first ghost story”, Hamaguchi declares – was a gift for crowdfunders of Happy Hour. A modest three-hander with a twisting, queer premise: a man lives with the ghost of a murdered woman, and when her sister calls to shoot a documentary, the ghost enters the man’s body.

Asako I & II (2018)
Adapting a popular novel by Tomoka Shibasaki about a woman in love with two men who look exactly the same, Hamaguchi deploys the bright, sentimental, ‘young adult’ styling of much contemporary Japanese entertainment. Yet his signature obsessions with the mystery of desire and the difficulty of choice are evident throughout.

Wife of a Spy (2020)
Hamaguchi co-wrote this script for his former teacher, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Set during World War II, the story’s intertwining of spy-game tactics and an ambiguous marital relationship amply pays tribute to 1940s Hitchcock. The film is notable for its Rossellini-like portrayal of female angst, and the reflexive use of amateur moviemaking.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)
Hamaguchi is a connoisseur of Éric Rohmer, and Rendezvous in Paris (1995) inspired him to make an episodic work: three stories of love, friendship and sex that are narratively distinct but thematically connected. The result is at once the funniest and most probing of his investigations into relationships and behaviour.

Drive My Car (2021)
Combining elements from three short stories by Haruki Murakami, Hamaguchi’s biggest international success to date gives a road movie structure to the subtle interaction between a grieving theatre director and his appointed, no-nonsense driver (superb roles for Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tōko Miura). The film embodies a search for emotional equilibrium.

Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
Set in rural Harasawa, an environment that greatly inspired Hamaguchi, this fable of the relation between nature and civilisation begins in a context of local ecological struggle, then slowly turns toward more enigmatic matters. Hamaguchi made, simultaneously, a 30-minute, dialogue-free version, Gift, presented with live musical accompaniment by Eiko Ishibashi.

© Adrian Martin March 2024