Happy Hour

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2015 / 317min / DCP

Four longtime friends in their late thirties living in Kobe, played by Sachie Tanaka, Hazuki Kikuchi, Maiko Mihara, and Rira Kawamura—together recipients of the Best Actress award at the Locarno Film Festival—are thrown into turmoil when one announces an impending divorce, prompting the entire group to turn to self-examination. Hamaguchi’s international breakout, at once austere and emotionally complex, garnered comparisons to the films of Jacques Rivette for both its director’s close collaboration with his female leads and his investment in the dramatic possibilities of durational filmmaking, and—anticipating his major arthouse successes 2023’s Evil Does Not Exist and 2021’s Drive My Car—marked Hamaguchi as one of the most distinct and significant new voices to emerge in Japanese cinema over the last decade. “A profound interlacing of experience, joining carefully observed particulars of employment and the tautly resonant bonds of friendship with the elusive and tragic mysteries of romantic love.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker