THE GREAT DIRECTORS OF ASIA

In March 2021, the Berlin Film Festival was still being held in an online format: Hamaguchi placed second in this competition and won the Silver Bear for his three-novel anthology Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Gûzen to sôzô). The Cannes Film Festival, whose May dates were as sacrosanct as the date of the New Year, moved to July that year for the first time since the end of the Second World War. But it was held live, as it should be, on the Promenade de la Croisette in the presence of the filmmakers. Hamaguchi was there in person to accept the prize for best screenplay and for ‘Best Competition Film’ from the accredited representatives of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) for his three-hour film Drive My Car, which fuses tropes from three stories by Haruki Murakami from the collection Men Without Women (2014) into a single plot with a single protagonist.

On 27 March 2022, Hamaguchi competed in four categories at the Oscars, which were delayed by only one month compared to their established timeline: best picture of the year, director, screenplay, and best foreign film. On the eve of the pandemic, in February 2020, the four Oscars in these categories were won by the Korean Parasite, which set a precedent by becoming the first non-English language film in history to win the Academy Awards’ highest honor.

With Parasite—an evil, cynical, raving about the apocalypse, which a century later resurrected one of the main themes of Marcel Proust’s epic (the parasitism of the service class) but replacing the Frenchman’s casual mockery with caustic black wit—the Eastern film world that had wrested the throne from Hollywood plunged into the abyss of lockdown. When Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car was among the top five finalists in the same categories as Parasite, it seemed that unlike the Korean film, this film was like a good fairy correcting the judgment of an evil one (‘The princess is not dead, she just fell asleep’). To many, this director, all of whose films deal, in one way or another, with the successful overcoming of a discredited or disastrous past, was the perfect symbol for the new dawn of cinema, a fitting phoenix from the Land of the Rising Sun.

However, the world proved itself more willing to listen to evil prophecies than constructive suggestions, and out of a possible four awards, Hamaguchi only won Best Foreign Film. In a way, though, he won big. After Parasite, Bong Joon-ho, its director, has not released a single film, and his next project is predictably connected with Hollywood, Robert Pattinson,1¹Robert Pattinson (b. 1986) is a British actor and model, star of the Twilight franchise. and some robots or the other. Hamaguchi’s name, who promptly served two films to a public hungry for fresh arthouse fare, quickly became a four-syllable festival charm, much like ‘Tarantino’ or ‘Almodóvar’. In 2023, he returned from Venice with the Silver Lion and the FIPRESCI prize again, this time for a new film, not simply Japanese, but made according to all the rules of auteur cinema, from Almodóvar to Muratova, by a team that were not professional actors but long-time collaborators. It was the movie Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa sonzai shinai).

Where did this shy and distant, but promising to become tender with the dawn, sunshine of a new film era come from—like the one that wakes up the protagonist of Drive My Car? He is driving a Saab Turbo on an early October morning, on his way to Hiroshima for the first time, unusually free for a forty-year-old man. He’s about to embrace the sum of new possibilities after the sudden, and almost fortunate, death of his lustful wife, who used to suffocate him with her embraces and post-orgasmic tales, drawn from Haruki Murakami’s story ‘Scheherazade’. Her passing ends a twenty-year-long morass of a marriage.

The title frame of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was preceded by a frame reading ‘Three Short Stories from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’, which flashed across the screen in what seemed like a presumptuously large font, considering that Hamaguchi would not become a household name until a year later. Nobody, including the filmmaker himself, could have guessed that he would do so. But he had already made a name for himself in the microcosm of the film festival circuit. In fact, his new film was eagerly awaited at the Berlin Film Festival’s online screening because his two previous films to reach European shores were very unusual and exhilarating.

The Locarno Film Festival is one of the oldest, the same age as Cannes, in the world. In the second half of the 1950s, when the festival movement gained the momentum that gave rise to the term ‘auteur cinema’ and made us treat its creators—including luminaries such as Bergman, Dreyer, Bresson, Fellini—not only as revolutionaries of the cinematic language, but also as modern philosophers, Locarno correctly assumed that in a world where festivals had become a dime a thousand, it was necessary to find some kind of specialization. They bet on debuts and experiments so radical that they could not even hope for limited distribution.

As a result, Locarno remains the most prestigious launching pad for the future gurus of festival cinema. Indeed, Michelangelo Antonioni, Claude Chabrol, Stanley Kubrick, Gleb Panfilov, and Shinarbaev tasted the beginnings of their worldwide fame here. This is where, as if from nowhere, Hamaguchi first appeared in 2015. The film was called Happy Hour, ran for 5 hours and 17 minutes, and grew out of an acting improvisation elective that Hamaguchi, then a master’s student in film directing at Tokyo University of the Arts, supervised, having accepted an invitation from the Kobe Exhibition and Creative Center (the Palace of Culture) to work as their artist in residence in 2013. At that time, he was also the co-director of a high-profile documentary trilogy about the aftermath of the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake, which made headlines around the world. One of the four friends who became the main characters of the film is actually the curator of the same center in Kobe, and the first hour of the movie is a class with such a hired ‘full-time creative worker’, whose talent, however, is not cinema but the ability to unmistakably determine the center of gravity of an object, for example, positioning a chair on one leg so that it will not fall over.

In the film, this creative artist and four forty-year-old friends search for each other’s centers of gravity, make physical contact, and make the discovery in the film that will lead to a chain of fateful events in their lives. After all, in childhood and adolescence, we constantly grab, touch, and fondle each other, either during some games or simply out of an abundance of emotions. But with the onset of sexual maturation, this contact becomes reserved for only those people and situations tied to sexual relations. By acquiring sex, and with it often the only person with whom we continue our life’s journey, we lose a true and clear awareness of our body and its place among other bodies, of ourselves and our place among other people. We lose, which is a significant factor, a clear awareness of the other, of their true desires and needs. Consequently, when we gain a person so that this person is at our full disposal, we lose the ability to love them truly, that is, to see them clearly, not to love an ideal idea of them but to love all their desires and hatreds. Ultimately, we simply stop noticing each other

The four friends, the creative crew, and other settlers and villagers were played by amateurs who participated in Hamaguchi’s elective. The four women who played the main roles won the acting prize at Locarno. And for good reason: each of them, under the close scrutiny of the five-hour movie narrative, had proven herself to be a unique diva in her own right. One of them, Hazuki Kikuchi, whose heroine Sakurako is the most sedentary, anchored in her family. At thirty-seven, she has even brought up a teenager who is already asking for money for an abortion (his classmate is pregnant). She is the spitting image of Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Luc Godard’s wife and muse of the festival cinema circuit in May 1968. She would later be recast in Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (2023), which he, already a recognized and recognizable auteur who’d successfully filmed many stars, cast exclusively from his own ‘panopticon’ (as Kira Muratova called her nomadic motley crew of selected Odessa city lunatics featured in most of her films) collected over the years from non-professional actors.

The second prize that Happy Hour won at Locarno was for its screenplay. In this awarding of prizes, the festival jury’s understanding of the task entrusted to them was so sobering that now, when Hamaguchi’s work can be discussed as an established phenomenon with its own regularities, it even seems prophetic. Hamaguchi’s script is a chain of postulates, each of which must be studied in detail until it is understood in all its complexity. They are realized through dialogues, and it is the task of the actors to make this experience of realization sensual and emotional for the viewer. When the experience is internalized, the postulate leads to the next one that follows from it like a proof in a theorem.

Another thing is that Hamaguchi himself—and this is why we love him—really doesn’t know where this chain of events will lead or which link will come next. The viewer follows the director on his quest, and this makes him pleasantly different from most philosophizing directors, who know from the beginning what they are going to prove and structure their script from the opposite direction. Hamaguchi has repeatedly stated that he sees no great difference between feature films and documentaries because in a feature film there will still be something documentary. The take that ends up in the movie records the moment of the actor’s existence in the part and in the environment, which will not happen again, just as the angle at which the sun fell on his face at that moment and the smallest facial differences in the actor’s behavior between takes will not happen again.

Hamaguchi’s tsunami documentary trilogy was a series of interviews with people who survived the disaster. With their stories of how they saw the signs of trouble but did nothing, how they stayed alive in places that had already proven the inevitability of future similar disasters, it shone a light on one of the main themes of Hamaguchi’s feature films. This is told in the snows of Hokkaido by the two protagonists of My Car: each in his own way could have prevented the death of the person closest to him, but did not. This psychological paradox—when we see a neighbor die, we freeze as if paralyzed, even when there is time to rush to help—is glossed over in Western culture, but it is not new to the Japanese. It is described, for example, in Riku Onda’s famous novel The Aosawa Murders (2005). In this paradox, too, Hamaguchi is still in the position of observer rather than interpreter. But when we see how the gentle sun floods the frame when his characters, freed from the man who was the center of their lives, rush toward the unknown—on the ferry in Happy Hour, in the Saab in My Car—how open they are to the surrounding landscape with its promisingly oblique rays, whether of sunset in the first case, or of dawn in the second, it is not difficult to guess that the desire for a new beginning, for a new birth, for this ‘infinite sum of possibilities’ is stronger in us than any of our strongest attachments.

But even this theme, in itself worthy of close study, is just one piece in a set of difficult questions that the director tries to assemble in one uninterrupted stroke of hours-long compositions. Alternatively, he breaks it down into smaller sections and tasks, much like the steps of an almanac, each contributing to the whole. Hamaguchi is always interesting because, unlike other filmmakers who have to be listened to by the audience, he is still in the middle of his own process, grappling with the puzzle himself. As a spectator, you feel like you are crawling up quietly and begin if not to rearrange the cubes with him then at least to stand there, breathing behind his back and closely following the movements of his hand.

When he works with non-professional performers, this effect of complicity becomes especially palpable. Their rather unpredictable behavior, a wrong gesture, an unrehearsed look, captures the confusion of an inexperienced player, not prepared for such a turn on the set. This moment acts like our virtual hands, suddenly moving the very cubes of meaning that are not bound by conventions of the industry. It’s like a child, looking over the shoulder of his grandmaster-father, picking up the knight on a chessboard and moving it, letting it go in a straight line.

It’s touching to see Hamaguchi’s hand twitch after such an unpredictable reaction from a professional. He swears by the use of a static camera, and he often mounts it inside a moving object like a car (more on that later) or on a dolly. In Evil Does Not Exist, the first half-hour that introduces us to the world of people living in wooden houses scattered in the forests at the foot of the Yatsugatake Mountains, the camera, if it moves, is on a cart, filming the tops of pine trees or the forest walks of the characters like a father with his eight-year-old daughter. It is clear that a person with a camera cannot pass so smoothly among all these bumps and ravines, and one gets the feeling that we are observing this world through the eyes of a certain forest spirit. However, after dinner, during which the locals discuss their strategy for the next day’s meeting with representatives from a Tokyo acting agency planning to open a glamping (a tent camp with all amenities) site in the area, the daughter falls asleep. We see her dream: everything appears as usual, and she and her father are walking in the same forest. However, for the first time, the camera observes them differently, turning around on a tripod like a man turning his head when observing a moving object. Thus, by breaking the plasticity of the scene, the director prepares the viewer for human intrusion, of the ‘urbanites’ through whose eyes we will see the future. Ironically, these city dwellers will like the local pastoral life so much that they will want to abandon their doramas and stay here forever to chop wood and collect spring water.

Similarly, in Happy Hour, after an hour of long static shots, the camera jerks sharply to the left, like a hand accidentally touching a boiling kettle. It follows the inappropriately sharp reaction of one of the heroines over a drink when she learns that one of her friends has long since decided to leave her husband and only she has not been informed. For Hamaguchi, it’s telling that this is a one-time action, and that it doesn’t become a common device. This is how he appreciates natural things and the transformative power of a single moment in life. And that’s a philosophy, too.

There’s no denying that Hamaguchi is a philosopher-director. While he was still at university, his master, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa,2²Kiyoshi Kurosawa (b. 1955) is a Japanese film director. He is not related to the famous Akira Kurosawa. who often quoted Andrei Tarkovsky, sometimes with deliberate mockery, offered Hamaguchi Solaris, Stanisław Lem’s famous novel, as material for his coursework. Kurosawa often worked in the sci-fi genre and introduced the visual motif of a house in the middle of a zone, inspired by Stalker. However, in License to Live (1998), arguably his best film, he mirrored a rather complex Vadim Yusov-style shot from the prologue of Solaris, where Chris is seen over a murky river. Yet, Kurosawa ironically smoothed it out by having his own ‘Chris’ bend down at the end of the shot to the grass and pull out a plastic bag filled with bottles and groceries from the department store.

Interestingly, it was from this Kurosawa movie, License to Live, that Hamaguchi borrowed the lead actor, Hidetoshi Nishijima, for the role of Kafuku in Drive My Car. In License to Live, Nishijima played a man who had spent ten years in a coma, having fallen into it at the age of fourteen. The actor flawlessly portrayed the angular plasticity of a teenager awakening in the body of a full-grown young man, a performance that made him a movie star. By referencing this signature role in Drive My Car, Hamaguchi emphasized that the central moment is the motif of awakening to a new life, which the physical habits of the old life hinders and delays, but cannot erase. After all, all of Hamaguchi’s films are about survivors: those who endure and, in doing so, become the ones that can tell the stories of the living and those who are no longer with us.

When Kurosawa suggested Solaris to Hamaguchi for a term project, he explained that he did so because he wanted to understand how the same novel, retold by two great directors, had produced both the world’s most harmonious and flawless film (Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972) and the world’s most silly and graceless one (Steven Soderbergh in 2002). Hamaguchi was given 4 million yen, not an insignificant amount for a term project. However, he used it wisely to make a one-and-a-half-hour movie with two characters, the space psychologist Kris and a clone of his suicidal wife Hari. It must be said that by limiting the plot of the novel to the relationships and dialogues of only two of its characters, the man and the doppelganger of his dead wife, Hamaguchi simultaneously acquired the semantic core of his future films and an obsessive visual theme, which for the general public, the superficial observer, for the moment remains something of Hamaguchi’s signature move.

Having discarded everything from the novel except Kris and Hari, Hamaguchi effectively became, for the rest of his life, a prisoner to one scene from Tarkovsky’s adaptation that he did not reproduce in his term project: the shots of the pilot Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) having a video conversation with Kris’s father while driving a car, which were filmed in Japan. In the early 1970s, Japan was about the only place that had the endless labyrinths of overpasses and tunnels that Tarkovsky needed both to create an image of the future and as a visual example of the fluidity that became a cornerstone of the film’s idiosyncratic style. At the beginning of this episode, the headlights of the cars are still barely lit in the twilight, a promising harbinger of evening. By the end, when the car reaches the city, it is already night, and everything is lit: the scene is crowned by an overhead shot of overpasses intersecting with subway lines.

Hamaguchi echoes Tarkovsky’s shot of overpasses in Happy Hour, right after the episode when the camera suddenly jerks, capturing the bickering girlfriends, divided into pairs, heading for the subway. It serves as a transition from the dialogue of one couple, who have taken the upper line, to the dialogue of the other on the lower line. However, in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, the first novella, Magic (or Something Less Assuring), opens with footage from a suburban photo shoot. Two girlfriends get into a car at dusk, the headlights on, engage in a fifteen-minute dialogue as the overpasses gradually turn into tunnels outside the windows. By the time they reach their destination, a neon-lit downtown, it has transitioned fully to evening.

One third of the three-hour Drive My Car is filmed from behind the wheel. The role of the video communication device from Solaris is played here by a cassette recorder embedded in the glove compartment. The hero Kafuku is rehearsing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and his wife has dictated all the lines except for those of Voynitsky (that is, Uncle Vanya). In Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Burton’s son sits in the backseat of his car, increasingly clinging to his father as the conversation progresses. After the death of his wife, Kafuku will rehearse Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. He’ll get a woman chauffeur, sit in the back seat and while listening to a tape of his wife’s voice, will read Voynitsky’s lines from there. But gradually, over the course of the movie, he will move closer, to the passenger seat. In the context of the film, which spends nearly a third of its time in the interior of the Saab, this has the same effect as the diminishing distance between the driver and his son in a brief episode of Tarkovsky’s film. The emblem of the film was the shot—repeated many times at the Oscar ceremony—when the two characters, the theater director and the chauffeur, came to like and trust each other to such an extent that he allowed her to smoke in the cabin, and both their palms, carrying lit cigarettes, stick out of the open top of the red car driving through the night.

Cigarettes are another important detail in Hamaguchi’s world, functioning as a signal light, a symbol, or an invitation to intimacy. Almost at the very beginning of Happy Hour, one of the characters, a nurse, goes up to the roof of the hospital to smoke. We never see her or anyone else with a cigarette for the rest of the film. Near the end, four hours after that first cigarette, when her character breaks her leg and is forced to stay home, we see the ‘creative worker’ coming out of the Palace of Culture, squirming from a question-and-answer session with a mediocre writer he is forced to host, to smoke a cigarette in the fresh evening air. As soon as he lights it and an orange-yellow dot appears in the blue darkness, a white spot begins to flash rhythmically from the depths: it is the plastered leg of the nurse on crutches, rushing toward the light. We did not expect to see her here, but we remember that she is the only one who smokes in this film, and so we take her appearance, provoked by the glowing tip of the cigarette, as something long-awaited and self-evident because dogs come to their masters’ whistle and rats to the Pied Piper. Of course, she will immediately ask for a cigarette, and this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The idea of a cigarette as a signal light of life, an invitation to share that life, is also borrowed from Tarkovsky. As Hari’s clone in Solaris becomes more lifelike, she smokes more often. The flame of Margarita Terekhova’s cigarette, smoking on the hedge in The Mirror, lures a stranger, a doctor, out of the twilight, who immediately expresses a desire to stay. When, in the climax of Stalker, Alisa Freindlich, having put all her vagabonds and cripples to bed, sits down cross-legged in front of the audience to talk about their souls, to finally explain why they are such freaks, where she collected them, and why she will never leave them, she lights a cigarette first, and she does it noisily, with gusto almost.

Solaris also gave Hamaguchi’s work its main plot line—the story of lost, runaway love (what is suicide if it isn’t escape?) and its doppelganger. In the third novella of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Once Again, it even plays out in reverse as two forty-year-old women are simultaneously misidentified and mistake each other for old friends they haven’t seen since high school. And this idea is explored even more fully in Hamaguchi’s second film, Asako I & II (2018). Presented under this title at the Cannes Film Festival, the film also gained international recognition under it. In the original, however, the film is called Netemo sametemo (Dream and Waking Up), or, more literally, Whether Asleep or Awake, like the 2010 novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, who later won the Akutagawa Prize for Spring Garden (2014), which was translated into many languages. ‘This is my first commercial film,’ said the director, without a hint of irony. And indeed, in contrast to the previous five-hour Happy Hour, with its forty-minute sequence shots and its slow envelopment—much like a snail enveloping itself in its spiral home—of the viewer into the circumstances of forty-year-old women, this two-hour film about very young people looks fast and kawaii, like a dorama.

Hamaguchi has cast the pouty Masahiro Higashide in a dual role. One is as a tough kid in Baku sandals who used to go out for bread only to return drunk the next day after visiting an old man he made friends with in a bathhouse, a kid who once went to Siberia in his sandals and returned eight years later as a billboard idol. The other is his exact opposite in personality, the mild-mannered, grounded clerk Ryohei. Romance fans have loved him forever for My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday, bad boys for his role as a street-gang fighter in Crows Explode, and intellectuals for his collaborations with Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The movie was not only filled with trendy music, dancing, fights, kisses under the most desperate circumstances—falling off a motorcycle at high speed—but also provoked a scandal that so often accompanies the release of doramas. It turned out that Higashide, whose wife was expecting a child, had been seeing his co-star Erika Karata, cast as Asako, for three years, and in Japan and Korea, screen idols are not forgiven for such a thing.

You must have guessed that Asako meets Ryohei after Baku disappears. She stays with him because of his face, and when Baku returns to her world, she doesn't hesitate to take his hand. But she soon discovers that he wasn’t Ryohei—and it was Ryohei she had grown to love during those five years of intimacy. Told this way, the story is quite dorama-like. But first, we must note there is nothing wrong with the dorama itself. And second, this one looks and feels like it was made by François Truffaut4⁴François Truffaut (1932–1984) was a French film director, probably the most lyrical member of the French New Wave movement. in the era of Stolen Kisses and Bed & Board.

In general, Hamaguchi, with his frequent and lengthy scenes of play rehearsals, book readings, electives, presentations, and question-and-answer sessions of all sorts, is often seen as inspired by, if not imitating, the work of one of the leaders of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette. Hamaguchi does not deny that he is familiar with his films, but cites John Cassavetes5⁵John Cassavetes (1929–89) was a Greek-American filmmaker, actor, and one of the key figures of the American independent movie scene. as the auteur who influenced him to become a director. But the truth lies somewhere in between. Hamaguchi is drawn to the improvisational style of the American director, and either prefers characters who live by the Cassavetes principle of ‘break and run’ or forces them to make that choice. But he lives in a modern, pro-Western society where even creative processes take the form of protocols, of stiff cultural events. He openly laughs at all the ‘palaces of culture’ and ‘staff artists’, which have been resurrected under new flags, at the stiffness of the people who attend all these readings and elective courses, and he shows, with obvious pleasure and without hiding his wicked sneer, exactly those citizens with the desire to become cultured people—those unkempt, unhealthy ones who have long forgotten, if they ever knew, what that mysterious ‘private life’ is.

After spending hours watching a film filled with strange people and listening to some newfangled gibberish about shaving balls being passed off as literature, the spectator will feel a sense of relief. They’ll want to run away on a ferry with the pregnant heroine of Happy Hour, who has run away from her husband. Following her is a young boy whose parents she once brought together and whose girlfriend did not dare to run away with him on the same ferry, preferring to have an abortion. This boy has just experienced his first heartbreak and despite that, he will still find freedom and joy in the fresh air. ‘Thank you, Aunt June! Thank you for life!’ After the stale air of countless rehearsals of Uncle Vanya, the audience will be invigorated by the cold wind of snowy Hokkaido, and it is there, in Drive My Car, that Kafuku will slip away with his lady chauffeur to look at the wreckage of her home and her previous life.

In Asako, this Cassavetes-like break-and-run attitude grabs the viewer by the throat and immediately pulls them in. Black-and-white photos by Gochō Shigeo from the Self and Others series set the tone, capturing the raw energy of street boys with exploding firecrackers, a sudden kiss from a stranger under the glow of those firecrackers, scenes of informal student clubs, funk, dancing, and a karate kick (and the kicking foot is in a sandal). When Baku is replaced by Ryohei, his polished Redfordian raincoats, cigarettes, and the glow of the evening traffic lights will evoke a different series of associations, blending seamlessly with Gochō’s photos. This imagery brings to mind Three Days of the Condor and Sydney Pollack’s existential romances. From Truffaut, who is somewhere between Cassavetes and Pollack, comes a vision of a fragile youth playing with maturity. His influence is seen in the seemingly toned brown shots that resemble the peculiarities of 1960s magazine photos, punctuated by the occasional garish splash of color in the shape of a red shirt or yellow sweater, and talk of movies, in this specific case, a TV production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

Chekhov is another cultural constant in Hamaguchi’s universe. In both Asako and Drive My Car, the debate over how to play Chekhov is resolved by the fact that it is not necessary to play Chekhov, but only to memorize and recite him. Chekhov’s plays capture the characters when ‘for fifty years now we’ve been talking and talking, and reading pamphlets. It’s high time we stopped’.iThe quotes from Chekhov’s plays are from the translations by Laurence Senelick (2006). Chekhov’s humor was largely influenced by his addiction to morphine, which made it especially unbearable and obvious that people’s conversations were empty and vain. Under its influence, it is painfully clear that while talking, people are simply threshing old straw and recycling old stories—they’re either going over memories or promising themselves something impossible, like the pledge to ‘labor for others both now and in our old age, knowing no rest’. In reality, they’ll eventually rest and settle down, if only for a while. Sometimes Hamaguchi joins Chekhov in this wry laughter.

In Asako, one of the characters is completely paralyzed, including his vocal apparatus, and when his mother, for the second time in the movie—and God knows how many times for him!—begins the same old song about how, as a schoolgirl, she used to take the bullet train to Tokyo just to have a cup of instant coffee with a young man, there is a sound like an old doorbell. It is the paralyzed man pressing the emergency button, declaring an SOS and for someone to save him! In Evil Does Not Exist, the townspeople drive the woodcutter crazy with their ramblings about what a miracle it is to chop wood and how they’ll be here forever. After he has to knock one of them down to prevent a wounded deer from attacking, his frustration reaches a breaking point, and in a frenzy, he strangles a man until he starts foaming at the mouth, just like Chekhov’s accountant Khirin from The Celebration, who, driven mad by the annoying old woman Merchutkina, mutters furiously: ‘Out! I’ll cripple you! I’ll mangle you! I’ll do something violent!’

That’s why Hamaguchi meticulously builds up all those long scenes with tormented people who have developed a longing for the sublime and went in search of it to ‘palaces of culture’ or, as in the recent Evil Does Not Exist, into the bosom of untouched nature so that the brief and always so inspiringly filmed impulses appear especially bright and liberating against their background. He is, of course, most interested in the place of love in this dichotomy of ‘organization and impulse’, or, more precisely, in its ideal space between these two poles. In both Happy Hour and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, the characters notice that in the company of a new acquaintance they feel at ease, they are themselves for the first time, something they never manage to do with the woman they love, while those they love conclude: ‘So these girls are not love after all.’ But Hamaguchi gets wiser with each film, and in Drive My Car, after listening to Kafuku’s story of how he pretended not to know about his wife’s infidelities for twenty years because he was afraid to talk about it, the lady chauffeur says something sensible: ‘Maybe there would be no end if you didn’t put her on a pedestal and loved her as she is from the beginning, seeing her simply as a woman.’

Since all of Hamaguchi’s films, in one way or another, dance around the old existentialist postulate that there will be no peace for us human beings until each of us indiscriminately follows the call of our own self and loves the same thing in others, I will not deny myself the pleasure of adding my own personal perspective to the director’s portrait in this context. Now, from the vantage point of my age, I know that this is not only the highest form of love—to love the one you love as they are—but also the easiest. It is as natural as breathing. But you just have to live long enough to reach that simplicity. Hamaguchi is younger than I am. In addition to all the other bittersweet feelings I get from his films, I have a sense of patronizing nostalgia that is both arrogant and poignant, as if I were talking to a very nice and very young man. And I am glad that today’s young people have such an interlocutor in the world of cinema, someone who is searching with them and for them for ways to truly love and live. The interlocutor is honest because the only conclusion he comes to with certainty is the one expressed in the final dialogue between Asako and Ryohei, who has allowed her to return but admits that he can never trust her again. Two very young and very nice people are standing on the balcony of their new, still uninhabited Osaka apartment overlooking a stream, and he remarks, ‘What a muddy river!’ And she replies, ‘Muddy, yes … But it’s beautiful!’

As a contemporary filmmaker: Happy Hour (2015) is a five-hour movie about three months of a late summer and early fall in the lives of four forty-something girlfriends. It’s essential Hamaguchi—improvised, conversational, forty-minute interior scenes are followed by short, unforgettable cinematic sequences in which key moments in the heroines’ lives are accompanied by nature: the August city, frozen in the midday heat and devoid of passers-by, allows the mother of a suddenly grown-up son to see her newfound loneliness as a second chance; the ferry leaving the sea terminal changes the fate of her friend; the fallen leaves of October rustle under the crutches of a crippled nurse with the promise that she will be smiled at just around the corner and offered matches by a stranger she meets. A perfect movie in the modern era of TV series, it is built as stories with sequels: you can split it into five evenings and enjoy it at the end of a workday, you can make it the perfect soundtrack to a hangover Sunday on the couch—in the case of a lazy and affectionate hangover, of course, not the shakes.

As a young filmmaker: Asako I & II (2018) is a kawaii bittersweet movie about how eighteen turns into twenty-five; it is suitable for a date for young people, the kind of people who should be warned about what love can lead to. It is also good for an evening spent between long-married people happy to remember once-forgotten love at sunset. And it is great just for fans of doramas because the movie is played by their favorite stars and accompanied by trendy songs and dances.

As a versatile filmmaker: Evil Does Not Exist (2022) was born out of musician-composer Eiko Ishibashi’s request to shoot a video sequence that could be projected on panels during her new concert program. Armed with a demo tape of the music for the upcoming performance, Hamaguchi went to the foothills of Yatsugatake, where Ishibashi and her partner, the musician Jim O’Rourke, live, filmed nature, then asked the housekeeper and assistant to act out the scenes and, to make it easier for them to play them, outlined the dialogue, which of course would not be heard at the concert. But he liked the way they recited the texts so much that he developed the plot further and made a full-fledged film that won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. But he didn’t break his promise to Ishibashi either—another version of the montage, without sound, became a one-hour film called The Gift, which she plays at her performances.

As an acclaimed filmmaker: Drive My Car (2021) is a film whose triumph began at Cannes and culminated at the Oscars. It has been seen around the world and has deservedly become the signature film of the post-COVID era. Hamaguchi directed both Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and three of Murakami’s stories at the same time, gracefully fusing them into a film plot that is like Japan itself, an island and yet indivisible, which appears here in its entirety, from the snow-capped hills of Hokkaido to Hiroshima in the south, warm and hearty as port wine even when you walk there ankle-deep in yellow leaves.

As an unknown filmmaker: Solaris (2007) is a ninety-minute remake of Tarkovsky’s film made by Hamaguchi as a student project, and it is still only available to viewers at Japan’s specialized student film festivals. Copyright confusion has prevented the tape from being shown more widely. With films like Asako I & II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, it is clear that Hamaguchi grew out of Tarkovsky’s film, just as, according to the famous Russian saying, all of nineteenth-century Russian literature grew out of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat.