Perhaps you, like announcer Leslie Jordan, had no clue who Ryusuke Hamaguchi was on the morning of last year’s Oscar nominations. (You have much less of an excuse not to have the pronunciation down.) The director of critical sensation Drive My Car, an extended feature-length adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, took the Academy Awards by storm with the trifecta of nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay — as well as a win for Best International Feature.
As if that weren’t enough, he also released a three-part anthology of short stories Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy to great acclaim and became 2021’s breakout star in global cinema. This has been a somewhat short time coming; though Hamaguchi has been making features for some time now, his breakthrough came with the five-hour female friendship melodrama Happy Hour in 2016. He then followed that up with 2019’s Hitchcockian doppelgänger tale of mistaken identity Asako I & II, which cracked the elite Cannes competition lineup.
Now that Drive My Car has received its official canonization by the Criterion Collection, I thought it was appropriate to reflect more on Hamaguchi away from the spotlight. (You say “I just got too swamped to write this piece when it was timely,” I say “it needed more time to marinate,” all semantics.) I’m grateful that fellow (Hama)Guchi Gang member Mark Asch agreed to help me think through what he and his films mean — in and of themselves and for the culture at large.
I reached out to Mark because his piece “Wanting Less and Needing More” in Filmmaker Magazine is still, for my money, the best piece assessing Hamaguchi’s work at large. Here’s an excerpt, emphasis mine.
In inviting you to simply sit with another person, Hamaguchi is a breath of fresh air amid polluted discourse. […] His films require our patience, which is different than demanding our attention—though Squid Game, say, is three times as long as Drive My Car, it feels like less of an ask, because it’s just another item in the queue for us to deal with, instantly integrated into an entire workflow of explainer pieces to read at the digital watercooler and handmade Halloween costumes to make after the strained supply chain failed to deliver enough to the shelves in time. Watching Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, by contrast, will bring you no closer to meeting your productivity goals—a claim even mindfulness apps make.
But at the same time, Hamaguchi’s narratives use contrivance and ruptures—disappearances, doppelgangers, chance meetings, coincidences, impulsive decisions, natural disasters—to surprise and unlock his characters and ruffle the films’ chic utilitarian elegance. (I’ve taken to calling his style “Uniqlo melodrama” for the way that it harmonizes the formal and emotional satisfactions of minimalism and maximalism.) His films are not “cathartic,” since there’s nothing purgative about their climaxes: all those dialogues and monologues work towards articulation, something spoken into being rather than expressed away. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy ends with a fanciful bit of role-play that becomes gradually more real, with backstory filled in, memories recalled and feelings finally, movingly embodied. Drive My Car ends with a character previously defined by self-containment now cocooned within the stuff of life, with a new dog and a new car (two Major Life Events to which many people impulsively committed during the pandemic). Characters, having become vessels, end his films fuller than they began them."
The term “Uniqlo melodrama” stuck with me, if for no other reason than it was so catchy I got a little mad I didn’t come up with the turn-of-phrase myself. “I […] kept associating the patience and stillness of Hamaguchi’s long takes with the comfortable-looking monochrome clothes, especially in the third segment [of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy],” Mark explained when I asked him to expound upon this invented genre. “The outfits are more chic in Drive My Car, but there’s a similar utilitarianism to them.”
So naturally, I wanted to ask a little bit more to help talk through (and, if I’m being honest, validate) certain feelings and impressions I had about Hamaguchi’s work. His films are eclectic and extraordinary … yet often tough to put your finger on any kind of defining throughline that can explain their brilliance. Mark graciously agreed to answer some questions over email, and below I try some combination of offering my own insight and guidance to bracket his thoughts so it doesn’t seem like I’m just shamelessly passing off his ideas as my own. (I offer a very hearty co-sign to it all, for the record.)
Why did Hamaguchi pop so much in 2022? If you ask Mark1, “Hamaguchi’s movies have so much scope—in terms of style, form, plotting, characterization—that the most transcendent expressions of emotion feel, within them, proportionate.”
Though his films can be vast as the three-hour Drive My Car or the five-hour Happy Hour, their power does not necessarily derive from their grandness or duration in the way epics of cinema accumulate force like a ball rolling down a hill. It’s small moments, like a hug over dishes in Asako I & II or lingering on an empty seat a bit longer than expected in Happy Hour, that explode like unexpected minefields of metastasizing emotion. The smallness becomes grand because it is small, not in spite of its size. “There are, in his films, refined traces of everything and nothing,” opines Mark, “a very cool-to-the-touch globalism.”
In everything from the lengths of his films (and the stories within them) to the way he frames space, there’s oftentimes an inverse or skewed relationship between the size things are and the size he grants them. Mark’s original Filmmaker piece posits that Hamaguchi is a transitional figure between a minimalist (outgoing) and maximalist (incoming) period in culture, and he elaborated on that a bit more upon prompting. “With proportion/duration/pacing as with all things Hamaguchi is such a protean filmmaker,” he added, “I think the reason it’s possible to see him as ‘transitional’ is that there’s so much going on in his films.”
Perhaps some of this stems back to his training under Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who’s a regrettable blind spot of mine I know I need to fill. Since I really have nothing to offer other than generalizations, I’m just going to cede the floor to Mark on this one as to why we shouldn’t be looking to place him between a spectrum of the painterly compositions of Yasujiro Ozu and the Western-influenced genre films of Akira Kurosawa:
“Hamaguchi’s major mentor in film school was Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a hard director to sum up in a purely national context given his interests in a variety of Japanese genres like the horror film and youth film and domestic drama and police procedural all filtered through a very eerie transnational ennui. One of Kurosawa’s assignments when Hamaguchi was in film school, incredibly, was having his students direct their own feature-length adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, with a budget of 4 million yen.
It’s hard to place Hamaguchi in the national cinema because it’s hard to place him in the international cinema. He inspires so many different influences and references, both in terms of what he reaches for in interviews and what critics reach for in reviews. I just checked, and in the same review where I compared Happy Hour to Ozu, I also mentioned Arnaud Desplechin and Christian Petzold, as well as Sirk.
[…] There’s such remarkable moments of rupture and contrivance in Hamaguchi’s film that put me in mind of Sirk and other masters of the grand cinematic gesture articulating huge unspoken appetites. In both Happy Hour and Asako you see women making sudden, impulsive decisions to blow up their lives; Asako is built on the wildest, most metaphorical conceit; Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy features strange coincidences and twists of fate; Drive My Car has a sudden death and an offscreen murder.”
Sirk in particular is an intriguing entry point into Hamaguchi, especially because the mid-century cinematic melodramatist of All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind fame is so frequently taught through the lens of camp and irony. (Or at least that’s how I learned him.) Hamaguchi sometimes takes a more sincere tack in approaching his characters as they navigate through similarly fraught emotional circumstances, but he does so without ever making obviously maudlin ploys for sympathy. It’s something like a little bit more headroom at the top of the shot above a character relegated to silence at dinner in Happy Hour or the way two women begin to loom larger in the frame when they acknowledge a mutual emptiness in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.
Yet even this bears the risk of reducing an irreducible artist because Hamaguchi contains an ironic streak as well, particularly in Drive My Car (but to some extent in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy). “Desire allows for coincidence to feel real and become reality within the stories,” Hamaguchi told me in our conversation last year. “And the failure of those plans appears only when the truth appears. I think coincidences often appear from our blind spots, because people often don’t know that it’s coming.”
These two films operate somewhere between a chilly remove and empathetic identification. With Hamaguchi’s characters learning to discover other people through their proxies, substitutes, or constructions, he challenges the audience to find an entry point through absence, silence, and negative space. Drive My Car in particular absorbs us in the mysterious manner of finding conclusions based on contradictions, truths reached through lies, as well as presences found in the spectral hauntings that loom within art and architecture.
So perhaps the best way to resolve this side of Hamaguchi is to simply acknowledge he is both all and none of these things — Schrodinger’s storyteller. He lets the needs moment and the story present themsleves and adjusts his style accordingly. I got into this from a camera blocking and cinematography perspective in my interview with Hamaguchi for Slant Magazine, and at this point, I’ll just let him say it in his own words:
How do you determine how proximate your camera should be to a character’s emotion?
When we shoot, I have the actors play from the very beginning to the end of a scene all the way through. Initially, what we do is place the camera in the best place of vision to be able to see the important actions that happen in the scene. But regarding the movement of the actors, we don’t decide exactly how the space is used, though I do ask them to use as much of the space that we have as possible. At the same time, we don’t really talk about where they might want to stop their movement. That’s because that stopping, I think, is decided by the emotion that’s present [in the scene]. And so, in some ways, that distance created between the camera and the subject is almost coincidental because it’s really dependent on emotional movement.
And then there’s the almost lucky shots that I get because of this process. But, then, sometimes I feel that the distance between the camera and the subject isn’t quite right, so then we’ll [reposition] the camera. We’ll continue to collect more incidental shots, and once I feel that we have enough of them, that’s when we say, “Okay, let’s move on.”
If there’s any sort of connective tissue that might bind Hamaguchi’s four latest releases of Hamaguchi, perhaps it’s to do with theater and performance. He’s frankly more inclined to tip his hat to playwrights influencing his work than filmmakers. Ibsen plays a role in Asako I & II; Chekov’s Uncle Vanya is deeply interwoven into the very fabric of Drive My Car; even Happy Hour gives itself over to full-length depictions of both a communication seminar *and* a literary reading.
“Hamaguchi is comfortable with stillness, with dialogue driven action and physical confinement,” Mark observes. “Many of his films simply function like plays.” We’re both a bit stumped trying to find some grand unifying theory of why the theater looms so large in Hamaguchi’s cinema, though we both see his self-critique within Drive My Car as a kind of skeleton key that might help unlock more. As he notes:
“Hamaguchi on the one hand has said he does fairly extensive rehearsals—10 days for each segment of Wheel, which is apparently a luxury in Japan as it would be in America where a long rehearsal period with actors is more associated with live theater. Yet what he does, which is what the director does in Drive My Car, is to get the actors into a conference room and first and most crucially ‘read out loud without emotion.’”
There’s something in this style that pulls at the actors from two directions — on the one hand, play make-believe and inhabit another person’s reality entirely. On the other, strip away artifice and affect to a point of inexpression beyond mere naturalism.
Especially in Drive My Car, Chekov’s play becomes something of a mythological property as it can both cut across cultural divides and allow Hidetoshi Nishijima’s Yûsuke Kafuku an artistic communion with his late wife. The play’s text seems to contain a self-fulfilling prophecy in the casting of its titular role and the self-destruction it reaps. It’s an extraordinary property and yet rendered entirely ordinary — real, perhaps — by Hamaguchi’s understated style.
He’s not sociological about role-playing so much as he’s anthropological. Perhaps we can only understand people through their refractions, Drive My Car suggests. So we seek to channel them through performance or entomb them through any number of art forms. It’s not quite sacred, nor is it profane — simply mundane for humans going about their life. Hamaguchi simply knows to point his camera at places where other filmmakers just see an empty void.
VIEWING
Happy Hour, 2016, Criterion Channel and MUBI (trailer)
Asako I & II, 2019, Criterion Channel and rental (trailer)
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, 2021, Criterion Channel and rental (trailer)
Drive My Car, 2021, HBO Max and rental (trailer)
FURTHER READING
“Where to begin with Ryusuke Hamaguchi,” BFI
A compendium of links to insightful Hamaguchi interviews, Criterion (not just linking here because it picked up a passage from my own interview … but it certainly didn’t hurt)
“A Five-Hour Japanese Film Captures the Agonizing Intimacies of Daily Life,” Richard Brody on Happy Hour in The New Yorker
“Strange Encounters,” Elena Lazic on Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy in Animus
“The Year of Hamaguchi,” Scott Tobias on Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car on the excellent Substack The Reveal
Thanks to the incomporable Mark Asch for his words, insights, and time delving into all things ‘Guch. You can follow him on Twitter at @MarkAschParody and find his writing most frequently (by my estimation) at InsideHook, Film Comment, Little White Lies, and The Playlist.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
P.S. — You’ve earned this.
It should be noted that Mark’s first response, in typical tongue-in-cheek fashion for those familiar with his sense of humor, was: “I think people caught on to Drive My Car because it had a cherry red 1987 Saab 900 Turbo in it. I think there is a profound yearning in the heart of the American people, a deep nostalgia—borne of a delayed sense of trauma and guilt over how much we threw away this century in the name of what we allowed ourselves to be convinced was progress—to return to the womb of a Saab.”