Hats off to MOMA for giving an extraordinary new film—“Happy Hour,” directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi—a weeklong run, starting today. The movie is extraordinary both in its artistry and in its dimensions: it runs five hours and seventeen minutes, which is why MOMA is showing it only once daily, at 4:30 P.M., and why it’s a tough film to release at all.
The very concept of a “release,” as opposed to a scattered handful of screenings, is important from a bureaucratic perspective—the film’s availability in a run of seven consecutive days makes it eligible for year-end consideration from critics’ organizations, polls, and (would that it were so simple) the Academy, and I’d be shocked if it doesn’t end up high on my own year-end list.
“Happy Hour” is Hamaguchi’s seventh feature (I haven’t seen the others), and its length is entirely justified, indeed richly and deeply filled. The recent movie to which it is most similar is Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret”; like Lonergan, Hamaguchi is a genius of scene construction, turning the fierce poetry of painfully revealing and pugnaciously wounding dialogue into powerful drama that’s sustained by a seemingly spontaneous yet analytically precise visual architecture. “Happy Hour” is the story of a group of four middle-class women. One of the four, Jun, has been friends with each of the other three, separately, for twenty-five years, and she introduced them to one another and united them as a group more recently.
The four live in the city of Kobe. All are thirty-seven years old. Sakurako is married to Yoshihiko, an unhappy and overworked bureaucrat, a modern-day version of the salaryman of Japanese movie classics; she stays home—alongside her mother-in-law, who lives with them—to raise their teen-age son, Daiki. Fumi, an arts administrator, is married to Takuya, an editor whose work with a young woman writer, Kozue, threatens to become personal. Akari, a tough-minded and plainspoken nurse, is divorced; in her solitude, she invests a great deal of energy in her friendship with the three others. Jun, who’s unemployed, has filed for divorce from her husband, Kohei, a biologist, who opposes it.
The action starts on the simplest of premises: the four friends plan to take an overnight trip together to a nearby spa town and its hot springs. But that trip doesn’t happen until midway through the film. Before they get there, Hamaguchi has sketched—or, rather, sculpted, with an exquisite filigree touch applied to the weightiest of materials—a profound interlacing of experience, joining carefully observed particulars of employment and the tautly resonant bonds of friendship with the elusive and tragic mysteries of romantic love. Fumi, who manages a performance space, has organized a sort of New Age seminar for a kind of communications guru, whose display passes from a literal balancing act involving chairs to intimate exercises for his ten participants. The scene—in which the characters move from passive observation to physical action, and, in the process, seem actually to undergo a spiritual and emotional transformation—runs for a half hour. It’s a tour de force of controlled cinematic energy, as ordinary staged action rises with a sense of quiet miracle to seemingly metaphysical power through simple and stunning changes of angle, composition, light, and mood. Here, as throughout “Happy Hour,” events of an apparently workaday negligibility reveal their transformative force and enduring effect, unleashing an irresistible torrent of new memories on the fly.
Akari is profoundly affected by her work at a hospital. She knows well that medical practice is a matter of life and death, and, in her tough approach to a younger nurse who’s beginning her career, she confesses the terror of accidentally harming a patient that’s an inescapable part of the profession. Her bluntly existential attitude toward her job is matched by her demands on her three friends; her need for perfect transparency, for utter and unsparing truth, makes her both an ideal and a scourge to those whom she loves. (The character is played by Sachie Tanaka, whose reaction to a friend’s bitter charge, her neck muscles involuntarily twitching, is one of the great recent moments of performance, reminiscent of Judy Garland’s eroticized eye twitch in Vincente Minnelli’s “The Clock.”) Akari is shocked to learn that Jun has filed for divorce and blames her for keeping the matter secret. But the extended courtroom scene that follows, of the divorce hearings for Jun and Kohei—which Jun’s three friends attend, as spectators—is one of the finest courtroom scenes I’ve ever seen, both in the confrontational agony of the process itself and in the resulting emotional manipulations, on the part of the married couple, their attorneys, and the judge.
“Happy Hour” is far more than an intimate drama. Its spectacularly complex grasp of the details of daily life, which—as in the courtroom scene—are seemingly tethered by mighty cinematic cables to the vast societal structures below, presents private lives and a political world, a way of life in which ideas and feelings are dominated by the force of law and the weight of tradition. The movie’s underlying and overarching drama is the struggle of these four women to forge identities and destinies of their own in the face of these mighty social forces. This grand achievement is no accident; it’s an ambition that Hamaguchi embodies in the film itself, in another astonishingly composed and flowing set piece, involving Kozue’s reading of her new set of stories—one of which depicts a romance at the very hot spring where the four women take their brief journey. Kozue’s story—and the Q. & A. that follows onstage, and even the post-reading chat, between Kozue and several of the four friends and their husbands—emblazons Hamaguchi’s ambitions, energies, desires, and artistic passions onscreen while unfolding their risks in action.
Throughout the film, Hamaguchi turns that action into natural symbol, reminiscent of the way that Douglas Sirk did in his romantic melodramas of the nineteen-fifties. A trip on a train and the closing of doors, a journey by ferry as it passes beneath bridges, the pointing of a crutch at an importuning man, a contrast of modern clothing and traditional robes, a gaggle of gray suits at a stoplight—the physical details of the characters’ lives fit their existence perfectly even while leaping beyond their context to form a world of independent emotional connections and supervening ideas. “Happy Hour,” a work of distinctly modern cinema, reaches deep into the classic traditions of melodrama—along with its coincidences and its violent contrasts—to revive a latent power for grand-scale observation through painfully close contact with the agonizing intimacies of contemporary life.
