Guzen to sozo

The intelligence of Hamaguchi is inscribed very far from the commonplace and he builds his poetics with accuracy in order to identify that which is elusive within emotions. What happens in the second story between a professor and a student, brought about by a plan for revenge by the student’s opportunistic lover, speaks to the cinematographic wisdom of this still young Japanese filmmaker: the scene that takes place in the professor’s office while the young woman reads an erotic passage from the professor’s recently published novel is a marvel of how to produce rhythm within a small, closed space, how to portion out emotional suspense, and how feelings that surprise even the very characters themselves can take form. The other stories are hardly minor in this sense either. The one that closes the film in particular, in which a woman returns to her hometown for a high school reunion after twenty years and ends up meeting with the only woman that she ever really loved. The traveling shots, the formal reframing within shots, the transitional shots in the scenes across the three episodes reveal that the same care is given to the inflections of what the characters say and the delicate, discrete gestures of the actors. (Roger Koza)

Hamaguchi Ryūsuke: SOLARIS (2007), PASSION (2008), THE DEPTHS (2010), SHINMIT-SUSA (2012), TOUCHING THE SKIN OF EERINESS (2013), HAPPY HOUR (2015), ASAKO I & II (2018), WIFE OF A SPY (2020), DRIVE MY CAR (2021)