Happy Hour
<PERSON> has a nigh-unparalleled gift for staging long, patient scenes of conversation. Happy Hour, which clocks in at over five hours and is in no manner episodic, is not an epic; rather, it’s a laser-focused dive into the particulars of a group of female friends, as they navigate their varyingly-unsatisfying love lives in middle age.
The film is structured around two long, performative set-pieces. The first, in which the women participate in a workshop of New-Age exercises in nonverbal communication, and the second, in which they attend a story reading, are in ways polar opposites of each other. In the former, <PERSON> elegantly stages the characters in a nonverbal ballet, his camera moving with them in awkward-yet-increasingly-precise harmony; in the latter, he continually cuts between characters at a verbal impasse, their differing interpretations of the story weaponized during increasingly hostile dinner conversation. 285
But in each case, what’s at stake is the ability or willingness of the women to communicate openly and honestly, either with each other or their respective men in their lives, and how the differing obligations of honesty and empathy produce irresolvable tensions of day-to-day living.
The narrative gently rises and falls, with a group trip to a hot spring as its center and its dramatic fulcrum, an event on which both the pasts and futures of our characters hinge. When <PERSON>, who has since revealed her intentions to leave her husband (and undergone a searing and emotionally brutal deposition—one of the film’s most uncomfortable demonstrations of the gulf between experience-as-fact and experience-as-felt)—takes the trip as an opportunity to vanish after losing her divorce case, her absence from the film acts as a negative prism through which her friends (whom she was pointedly responsible for uniting in the first place) and their own unhappiness are refracted, leading to the dissolution and fracturing of their lives and relationships in the film’s second half.
<PERSON> has a craftsman’s precision with blocking and framing, and a highly charged understanding of how to purposefully employ cuts, so his conversations, in all their long-winded development, are always undergirded by tension borne of keen and emotionally acute observation. What’s more, he’s such an effective visual storyteller that, rather than flattening the film’s dramatic potential, his empathy leaves us uncertain where to place our emotional loyalty, and makes each scene a dramatic tour-de-force. He routinely visually emphasizes the social and personal strictures by which Japanese women are bound, and when he employs the various motifs with which he underlines the transitory nature of the characters—trains and ferries departing, stairs or hills being ascended/descended, breathtaking montages of anonymous urbanity at dusk—it’s that much more powerful for how restrained his style is. As in Asako I & II, <PERSON> quietly burrows into the messy human core of melodramatic tropes and emerges with a story that in spite of its immaculate contrivance is uncompromisingly honest. 285