Happy Hour

Released 2015, directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi

1.

Happy Hour is five hours and seventeen minutes long. Wikipedia, in its list of very long (over five hours) non-experimental films, has only twenty-two entries. Thus any time a film the length of Happy Hour is released it should be treated as at least an event – an outlier, a cinematic Manute Bol.

Certain lengths have legs with certain audiences. Forms that are short but not too short are popular at large: the comic strip, the sitcom, the pop song, at one point the short story. Forms that are moderately long appeal to aficionados and critics: the novel, the feature film, the symphony, the album. Of course it’s much more mixed than this – there are arty pop songs, and there’s a rumor going around that certain movies are in fact broadly popular. I’m being a bit tendentious to make my points.

Once a category of art has become habituated to a certain length, works that fall too far outside that length begin to feel unstable. If they are very long we wonder if they aren’t in fact a collection of parts. If they are very short, we feel as if they somehow don’t count, and we invent classifications to prevent them from assuming too high a status – a short written work cannot be a novel, because it is a short story. A short filmed work is eligible for a single, very specific Academy Award.

Nevertheless, between short and long it is length that has the greater weight. When a work is both well-liked and long, it can be called monumental, which sounds nice. No one, or few people, has ever called an epigram monumental; although the fault lies not at all with the epigram, but entirely with us.

Yet the movies, whose very existence is predicated on speed – on framerate – are resistant to monumentalism. Their standard length of around two hours is both critically and popularly ergonomic, offering a pleasing but unbulky heft. Moreover, it is practically difficult for a movie to be very long. They are expensive to make and to screen, and their consumption is linear and quick; if you are a few hours in and start to forget what happened in hour one, you can’t go back and check.

2.

In fact Happy Hour was never meant to get so big – it was planned and scripted to come in at two-and-a-half hours, long but conventional. Hamaguchi, who previously directed a series of documentaries on the Tōhoku earthquake, had convened an actor’s workshop in Kobe; the idea was to work with non-professionals, and to develop in parallel an ensemble and a story. The story that emerged was that of a group women in their late thirties, close friends, uneasy in their stance towards marriage, and particularly towards men and male prerogatives (their attitude brings to mind Elizabeth Hardwick writing on Virginia Woolf: “She thought and wrote seriously not only about being a woman but about the defaults and defects of the world made by men.”). One of them is trying to divorce her husband – which requires her to undergo a grueling legal procedure in order to prove that their marriage is beyond repair. Her husband fights her in court. He wins and she commits suicide, leaving her friends to perform that common narrative denouement of sifting through the wreckage.

But this is not exactly the story that ended up being told. A quartet of actresses from the workshop were chosen to play the women, none with any substantial previous acting experience, and all with careers (filming for Happy Hour would have to be done on weekends to accommodate them). From the start, it was planned that the existing script would serve as a living document, to be revised; that these actresses would have an ownership over their characters, and input into how they would act. One dynamic at play was that the scriptwriters were all men, while the focus of the film was of course female perspective and experience.

The biggest change made – one that altered the tenor of the film completely – was around Jun (Rira Kawamura), the woman divorcing her husband, whose suicide was meant to provide Happy Hour’s falling action. Kawamura felt that the suicide was in essence a narrative fix, untrue to character – that Jun would continue trying to pursue an independent life of some kind even after her divorce failed; thus Jun’s death was converted into a disappearance. The death would have closed the film. The disappearance instead opens it up, offers new character combinations and moods and genre possibilities to explore – the film’s end was now its midpoint.

3.

Drama is compression for drama, melodrama is compression and heightening. In “realism” there is compression for “realism”. Genre is when you have atmospherics. When there is no compression for drama or “realism”, there should be, I imagine, compression for something else. Very few films take place in real time, thus very few films are not compressed; I’m not sure if there are any films that are not heightened. Does this mean that almost all films are melodramas?

All of the above are things you might think, although perhaps with more clarity of expression, while watching Happy Hour. In its bones it is a drama, in that it chooses to focus on incidents that are interesting – divorce, infidelity, abortion – yet also commonplace; high points of interest within a fairly typical human life. It is also a melodrama, which I’ll get to. And it also contains two very long scenes which play out in a semblance of real time (although not in real time).

The first of these is a workshop, not an acting workshop but a sort of New Age kind of thing, that the four women attend together. The workshop is led by an artist named Ukai (Shuhei Shibata), who like Hamaguchi has a connection to the Tōhoku quake – he volunteered during the aftermath, during which time he also developed his artistic practice (balancing things). Ukai has the women participate in various exercises, none perhaps quite serious: touching foreheads to read each other’s thoughts, placing an ear next to a partner’s stomach to listen to their guts. There is no drama in this sequence, which lasts nearly an hour, nor much “realism”; it bears a surface resemblance to documentary footage, although beneath the surface there is of course a creative consciousness at work, calibrating and polishing. The result is that we are entertained, without quite registering what it is that is entertaining us; reality is seamlessly beautified.

 The second long scene is at a reading by a young short story writer, and is quite cut up: we see much of the reading, but we also miss large parts of it so that we can attend to various subplots. In this scene we are very aware of the artifice, partly because these plot bits need to happen in a very particular sequence and cadence, and the effort of it is visible and impressive. There is also a tendency, as the scene progresses, and then as the film progresses (the scene’s aftermath forms the final act) for events to heighten into the aforementioned melodrama. There is even an aha! moment, although personally I was more surprised that the film had an aha! moment than by the aha! moment itself.

That moment however is eventually undercut; and in fact such undercutting is systematic, a continuous excavation of the melodramatic high-ground even as it is thrown up. A key connection between two characters is shown to be less than meets the eye, an impulsive, cathartic affair is placidly confessed to without consequence; we are even led to believe that one of the characters has died in a car crash, then told they’ve only been injured. It’s a strange rhythm to end on, and speaks to the ongoing tension present in Happy Hour between audience interest and truth – both truth of character and truth of scene (one scene for example requires a character to receive two phone calls in succession, and rather than cut from one to the next, or have them arrive in a convenient one-two punch, we are instead given a minute-long still shot of their phone between the first and second call). That this is a productive tension is testified to by the length of the film, where time and detail have grown up like scar tissue around the wounds to reality meted out by artistic license.

4.

The aesthetic of the film is moderate. The soundtrack is “modern classical”, of the type that gestures neutrally at the assumed beauty of the world. The Ozu-like pillow shots that punctuate the action are not calculated to be beautiful, but to not be calculated.

The flip-side of this studied innocuousness is a gnostic tinge, or rather a flicker that plays along the edge of certain sequences, that casts a cross-light on certain lines of dialogue. This low-key hint of the occult has to be one of the defining small-bore traits of contemporary art fiction, and is often used as a way to get lift – resonance, mystery, transcendence, unease – out of everyday materials. A brief exchange between Jun and a woman she chats up on the bus provides a good example: their talk is subtly but highly stylized, creating overtones of meaning that are just beyond our range of perception, and that are not in fact meant to be perceived even as we clearly know they are there. It’s like a ghost story without a ghost, but where the existence of the ghost is real and taken for granted (but not discussed).

More substantial are several repeating themes: characters falling, characters alternating between light and shadow (here Vadim Rizov points out that this is at least partially an artefact of the digital cameras used to make the film). Make of these what you will – they are very much a viewer’s choice, in terms of meaning.

Most substantial is the odd, slightly dreadful development of Ukai’s character. He at first appears harmless, and even benign in that his workshop further heightens the intimacy between the film’s four central friends. Later we begin to see him as manipulative, and in one sequence openly abusive. His motives are never clarified, but there is an element of wanting to see what happens – of putting people under stress to observe the results. While the film’s overt theme is of women seeking freedom, Ukai’s influence on these four women is in fact pervasive; nor does the film end with any catharsis from it. Moreover, there are parallels between Ukai and Hamaguchi – the connection to the Tōhoku quake, and the fact that Happy Hour was developed while Hamaguchi was artist in residence at a cultural center in Kobe, while in the film Ukai considers and ultimate rejects a similar position; and of course also that both are men engaged in the project of manipulating women, Hamaguchi fictively, and Ukai sincerely within Hamaguchi’s fiction. This dark recasting of Hamaguchi’s role is not sharply developed, and I have no idea if it is meant as a self-critique; I suspect that if it is a critique it is meant to apply more generally. It is very much an ambiance, a quiet suggestion that if certain atmospherics were put in place and Happy Hour were developed as genre, it would be closer to horror than comedy, or even mystery.

Jun herself is also presented as controlling, perhaps in a benign way although not certainly so. She is the one who brought the four friends together; we even find out that she played an aggressive matchmaker role between one friend and her eventual husband (the marriage hasn’t turned out well). She has an extreme depth. We aren’t meant to think that she is entirely safe.

5.

I find it hard to write about acting, or even to frame acting in such a way as to be able to write about it. I understand that a chef, for example, is supposed to make food that tastes good, but I don’t understand what it is that an actor is meant to do. I don’t think I would care if an actor played an entire movie with an unnatural, inappropriate smile, or with their eyes closed, or speaking in pig latin (with subtitles). On the other hand I often have thoughts like, “this is a good actor,” or “this is a bad actor,” or “oh good, I didn’t know they were in this, I like them”. The whole thing is very confusing.

Hamaguchi describes his technique for preparing his actors as follows. He has them do table reads of the script, over and over again, without inflection. Then once he hears a certain “setting” of the words (like concrete), he is ready to shoot. However accurate this is as to his day-to-day method, it perfectly matches the result on film. Performances are even, with very little modulation even in moments of high emotion; they are also very thick, and there is a sense that many small, hard to observe things are happening that together convey the force of a character’s inner life, without together constituting motion. The stillness creates a sense of a unique emotional register, a calm that is no less calm for being at least partially the result of repression (after things set what are they but repressed?).

The four first-time actresses in Happy Hour jointly received the best actress award at the Locarno Film Festival, and having said all of the above I can’t imagine better acting than their acting. They all seem perfect; and while at the same time I can imagine a professional cast reaching for effects that they don’t reach for, again the relevance of these effects escapes me.

6.

A final note on length. At a certain point length becomes its own enticement. I don’t mean in the summitive sense – the sense of wanting to have said one has finished War and Peace. I mean, I guess, the relaxation of it. Length prolongs the gliding middle parts of a work, it makes for a long skate. With the beginning out of sight and the end beyond the horizon we are free to wander – even our attention is free to wander – and in the very center of such works a kind of hushed narrative barrenness takes hold, an attractive sense that we are in the hinterlands, that we have gone beyond tourism and discovered something, even if that thing is not particularly sought after or valued by society at large.