NZIFF Film Review: "Happy Hour" ("ハッピーアワー") (2015).

"A unique experience." This is Happy Hour (ハッピーアワー). This Japanese drama film directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi and written by Hamaguchi, Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi. The film is a slow-burning epic chronicling the emotional journey of four women in the misty seaside city of Kobe. All in their thirties. Three married and one divorcee. They are able to tell each other anything. Or at least they thought. One day, after losing in divorce court, one of them gives up on a future with their partner and disappears. The three remaining women take a second look at their lives. The long night is full of questions. 'Are you really the you you wanted to be?' As they navigate the unsteady currents of their work, domestic, and romantic lives a sudden, unexpected rift opens between that propels each to a new, richer understanding of life and love. 

The film was first developed while Hamaguchi was an artist in residence at KIITO Design and Creative Center Kobe in 2013. It came out of an improvisational acting workshop he held for non-professionals, with many of the film's performers having participated in the workshop.

The film stars Sachie Tanaka, Hazuki Kikuchi, Maiko Mihara, and Rira Kawamura. Thanks to the strong performances given by Tanaka, Kikuchi, Mihara, and Kawamura, we see them fully in all their thorny complications as we spend so much time with these ordinary women.

With great warmth and poignancy, Hamaguchi's Happy Hour is perhaps one of the most satisfyingly nuanced portraits of the profundity lurking beneath the day-to-day grind. Running nearly five and a half hours, Hamaguchi's movie foregrounds the quotidian, revealing the latent drama in the most seemingly mundane moments. However, Hagamuchi does not waste the five plus hour film time and allows us to get to know, intimately, each of the ladies, their lives, hopes and fears Hamaguchi offers great perspectives into the dynamics of friendship, marriage and the unknowability of others, shedding surprising light on the men in these women's lives in his final acts. Hamaguchi proposes a life-world in which the experiences that are really supposed to rearrange our daily identities actually do. It's worth putting aside the time to see how the film excels in every way a narrative film can. Through small glances and brief, cautious words, Hamaguchi conveys volumes. Buoyed by four captivating performances from its unheralded actresses, Happy Hour is a fascinating, towering confection of contradictions. In the film, and particularly in that beautiful scene on the ferry, the world is not just gliding by-it is being slid into place before our eyes, as if for the first time. The film commands respect through the audacity of its conception and scale, and it earns affection through its humane attentiveness. 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. If the film doesn't quite deliver all it promises, that may only be because it promises quite a lot.

Simon says Happy Hour (ハッピーアワー) receives:

Also, see my NZIFF review for One-Eyed Jacks.