The Films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 02 May 2024 09:12

Written by Jack Angstreich

Evil Does Not Exist

From April 26th through the 30th, Film at Lincoln Center presented Hamaguchi I & II, a major—and indeed, necessary—retrospective of the work of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi—one of the most significant cinematic talents to have emerged in the past couple of decades—in anticipation of its release on May 3rd of the director’s latest work, the powerfulEvil Does Not Exist,whichhad its local premiere at last year’s New York Film Festival.

A cinephile and later a student of the eminent director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hamaguchi has acknowledged admiration for—or being influenced by—numerous directors, notably including, among others: Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Jean Grémillon, Douglas Sirk, Robert Bresson, Masahiro Makino, John Cassavetes, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Hong Sangsoo. (Many scenes in automobiles also inevitably recall the  oeuvre of Abbas Kiarostami although Hamaguchi has traced this tendency to a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.) In a 2019 interview with Vadim Rizov for the magazine, Filmmaker, he said, “I think the biggest inception for me to becoming a director was watching Cassavetes,” evidently especially Husbands. For me the connection to Rohmer is clearest—for both filmmakers the voluble characters frequently misjudge their own motives and contradict their professed opinions and in Hamaguchi there too is arguably a commitment to a kind of Bazinian realism; there is also a common fascination with coincidence although for the younger director this does not have a religious significance.

In the same interview, he went on to discuss his first feature film,Solaris,from 2007:

Solaris was the first project that my professor, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, gave me in my first year as a grad student at the Tokyo University of Arts. That was only the second year that this Tokyo University of Arts program had been founded. I had a huge budget, 4 million yen or so. The first iteration of that project is normally to do a school horror film project. But for my iteration, Kurosawa gave us this project to adapt the original novel ofSolaris. [He told us,] “I was really interested in the original novel. I thought maybe Tarkovsky did a good job with it, but Soderbergh didn’t really do a good job, so I wanted to see what you guys can do.” It was a 30-person class and we were all tasked to create this project together, performing different roles in the production. There was a competition for whose screenplay should be chosen, and mine was. The resulting 90-minute film was rather good, and critically well-acclaimed, but because we didn’t go through a rights process with the original novel, it couldn’t be shown publicly and we could only do internal screenings at school. I didn’t necessarily think of it as performance-based, but dialogue-based, and focused on the dialogue between the boy and the girl. I tried to film one line of dialogue that immediately results in the next in a direct, linear format, and realized that that had its limitations, so I tried to fix that in my next film,Passion.

Passion, his 2008 feature-length thesis film for the Tokyo University of the Arts—andwhich had its premiere local run at this venue last year—already evidences his originality and assurance. Film at Lincoln Center’s program note includes the following summary:

The film begins when a couple, Kaho (Aoba Kawai) and Tomoya (Ryuta Okamoto), announce their engagement to their friends over dinner, where it’s also revealed the groom had an affair years earlier. While the two spend the evening apart, Tomoya follows his friends to the apartment of a former classmate (Fusako Urabe,Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) with whom he’s in love and is led into ever more vulnerable and shocking exchanges of emotional honesty. 

The extraordinary Happy Hour, from 2015, which runs longer than five hours, was Hamaguchi’s first movie to attract international attention, and given its scope and ambition is in some ways his magnum opus. Film at Lincoln Center’s brief description is as follows:

Four thirtysomething female friends in the misty seaside city of Kobe navigate the unsteady currents of their work, domestic, and romantic lives. They seek solace in each other’s company, but a sudden revelation creates a rift and rouses each woman to take stock.

It was screened in New Directors/New Films in 2016.

Also remarkable is Asako I & II from 2018 which screened at that year’s New York Film Festival. Film at Lincoln Center’s capsule on it reads thus:

Asako (Erika Karata) and Baku (Masahiro Higashide) share an intense, all-consuming romance—but one day the moody Baku ups and vanishes. Two years later, having moved from Osaka to Tokyo, Asako meets Baku’s exact double. 

In an interview with Jordan Cronk for Film Comment at the Cannes Film Festival that year, Hamaguchi spoke about the work’s genesis: 

This all started about six years ago, when someone who had seen my films recommended the novelist Tomoka Shibasaki’s work as something I might enjoy, and so I read a couple of her novels and found myself really liking this one. I thought that it would make a good film because it has visually intriguing elements built into it, the two being: what to show and what not to show. The first, what to show: of course you have to show the two men who look exactly the same, and it’s the story of a woman who falls in love with these two men—and this premise really spoke to me from the beginning. The way that the novel presented this story was very contemporary, which I really liked, a meticulously detailed account of everyday life. It’s written in first person, and things that happen can be veryout there, but it’s written in such detail that you go along with it, and I thought it would be interesting to see that translated onto film.

He went on to say: 

I consciously decided to employ the conventions of genre films in the telling of this story because I felt that it would help the audience to accept what was happening a little bit easier. It also helped with the pacing of the film, employing these conventions allowed the film to move a lot faster than usual without losing the audience. Those who don’t really understand those conventions might feel what is happening to be a little strange or even grotesque—or maybe a better expression is absurd, surrealist, or illogical. But one of the things I wanted to do was to have realism and surrealism coexisting: allowing something real to come out of this absurd situation, or to have some absurd quality rooted in the reality that we crafted.

From the same interview, the director discussed his approach to directing actors, the same as that of Jean Renoir:

As for the matter of improvisation, I kind of carried on in the style that I had established with Happy Hour, which was very much a kind of repeated reading of the text. My workshops are basically having the actors not perform butread the text over and over, and for these readings I ask my actors not to add any nuances or inflections. It’s more about reading the text aloud, over and over, until they can almost say it automatically, and there comes a moment when I can hear it in their voice—a certain weight or thickness—and the words that are written are completely absorbed into the actors. Once we accomplish this, it’s time to shoot. That’s a method I had established with my previous work, and, even with Happy Hour, the scenes that were improvised mostly came through workshopping. Apart from the longer sequences which were deliberately done differently, everything is scripted. Once it comes time to shoot, once we’re on set, how the actors express that fully absorbed text is entirely up to them. I don’t prohibit anything, so whatever they feel in that moment, or however they react to the other person, as long as it’sreal, that’s what I’m looking for.

Hamaguchi co-authored the screenplay for Kurosawa’s acclaimed spy drama,Wife of a Spyfrom 2020, and then wrote and directed the beautiful anthology of three stories, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy from 2021, which also screened at the New York Film Festival and was on the list of the ten best films of 2022 according to Cahiers du Cinéma. (The invaluable critic Jonathan Rosenbaum also selected it for his list of the best films of that year.) The director has cited as inspiration Rohmer’s marvelous Rendezvous in Paris. 

Drive My Carfrom 2021—and also shown at the New York Film Festival—based on short stories by the internationally celebrated author Haruki Murakami, is another major achievement. Film at Lincoln Center’s note on it says:

Hamaguchi charts the unexpected, complex relationships that theater actor-director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) forges with a trio of people out of professional, physical, or psychological necessity: his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), with whom he shares an erotic bond forged in fantasy and storytelling; the mysterious actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), whom he’s drawn to by a sense of revenge as much as fascination; and, perhaps most mysteriously, Misaki (Tôko Miura), a plaintive young woman hired by a theater company, against his wishes, to be his chauffeur while he stages Uncle Vanya. 

The director continues to move from strength to strength with his latest feature, the enigmatic Evil Does Not Exist—he has acknowledged the work of Jean-Luc Godard as an influence. Film at Lincoln Center offered this synopsis:

Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana, and takes care of odd jobs for locals, chopping wood and hauling pristine well water. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, where deer peacefully roam free, is about to be disrupted by the imminent arrival of the Tokyo company Playmode, which is ready to start construction on a glamping site for city tourists—a plan, which Takumi and his neighbors discover, that will have dire consequences for the ecological health and cleanliness of their community.

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