Public Flux in Happy Hour

A museum was screening Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour a week or so ago. Unfortunately for me, all the showtimes listed were set to overlap with other obligations of mine, so in order to spare myself from not seeing it when my geographical peers could I watched it online. This created an imperfect viewing experience wherein I was simultaneously able to rewind and rewatch scenes of note while being occasionally confronted by improper or missing subtitles, making it difficult at times to grasp what characters were saying. Given that the movie deals with how people, even the most historically intertwined, can fail to understand each other, I suppose that my semi-regular captions-derivative disconnect with characters’ words only served to enhance the themes they communicated. Playback issues aside, I had a good experience watching Happy and will watch it again eventually probably.

My knowledge of Hamaguchi extends back to the 2021 release of Drive My Car, a movie that I saw on a whim the month it started playing in the US. I was unaware that its script had been adapted from a Haruki Murakami story and was tickled when I saw the opening credits’ acknowledgment of this fact since for a few years at the time I’d felt kind of haunted by the author. Everyone in my age range that I encountered kept mentioning that they were reading something by him, that Norwegian Wood was their favorite book at the moment, etc. Compounded with the then recently released Burning, it felt to me as if Murakami had not only infiltrated the minds of those in my social circles but had overtaken the silver screen also.

Anyways: Drive was a pleasant watch, long and winding and warm but gloomy. I liked it better than the story it was based off of for its improved sensitivity and scope. It had the comfortable aura of a Murakami text without the typical creepiness - e.g., his treatment of women, dealt with nicely by Mieko Kawakami in a Literary Hub interview with him. The film’s themes of grief, theater (and art, more generally), flawed communication, and troubled human connection were all impactful - especially, on the day I saw the film, which I recall as being a pretty unhappy one. The soundtrack made by Eiko Ishibashi is really lovely too, its melodic motifs emoting a warm oceanic sadness. There were many days in the winter following my seeing Drive that I would loop the record while driving between work and school and home to great melancholic effect.

All of the above distracts from Happy Hour, the film that I want to talk about here. Specifically, Happy’s focus on transit is of interest.

The film’s poster features its four central characters - Fumi (Maiko Mihara), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), Jun (Rira Kawamura), and Akari (Sachie Tanaka) - sat in a tram. The scene that the poster’s image is lifted from takes place at the movie’s beginning before its opening credits. The women remark about their ears popping from the pressure as the tram lifts them northward up an incline, all of them sat still together as the world moves around them outside the vehicle. It seems crucial that the movie’s representational surrogate, its poster, shows them situated in such a space.

The women are all 37 years old, just about middle-aged, living in Kobe and on the surface appear like content people. Over the film’s duration, however, we see each of them unravel: Fumi, an arts space manager, wrestles with resentment toward her editor husband Takuya, who has ambiguous yet likely romantic feelings for a 20-something female author he’s working with; Sakurako plods along in a domestic routine of caring for her distant and observably unloving careerman husband, their teenage son who ends up getting a schoolmate of his pregnant, and a mother-in-law that lives with them; Jun attempts to divorce her emotionally withdrawn husband who cannot accept her rejection of him; and strong-headed Akari, already divorced by the film’s start, is a capable nurse that mostly though not ultimately keeps others, including the several men that we see proposition her, at arms length.

The chief catalyst for the film’s events happens in its first third when Jun reveals to her friends the news of her divorce. This shocks them to the extent that they are all mutually set on paths of reckoning, made to quietly contemplate the relationships that they’re in with their significant others and with each other, and mobilizing each of them to gradually challenge their individual circumstances to varied, not always colossally cataclysmic ends. Thematically, the revelation of Jun’s divorce illustrates Happy’s message that one can never wholly know what others are thinking and experiencing.

There are several notable scenes that advance this theme. One materializes as a long sequence that precedes Jun’s disclosure where the women attend a workshop held at Fumi’s arts space. The workshop is run by Ukai (Shuhei Shibata), an eccentric ‘artist,’ although he later rejects the title, that specializes in making gravity-defying sculptures - really, just objects that are balanced in such a way that they are suspended in air. The goal of the workshop as he puts it is to ‘explore alternate methods of communication’ through various exercises. For instance, he has the women and their fellow attendees break into groups of two where they’re asked to stand forehead to forehead in order to transmit unspoken thoughts between one another. A further exercise has folks putting their ears to others’ stomachs to hear what is inside them. What unites these activities is an objective of accessing some internal, otherwise unreachable part of another person. This vague unknown part is unsayable.

A later, equally long sequence that fleshes out Happy’s theme of inescapable separation occurs in its final third. Again, viewers witness the women at Fumi’s arts space - this time, as they attend a reading and follow-up Q&A for the author that Fumi’s husband is working with. Said author, Yuzuki Nose (Ayaka Shibutani), shares an excerpt titled “Steam” from a forthcoming book of hers. The narrative follows a college student Yayoi as she travels by train to the Arima Hot Springs, a place the film’s characters visit in an earlier scene:

The train is climbing the hill. I transfer at the next stop. Then, it’s one stop to my destination. The train slowly takes a corner, and I see a black hole ahead. A rail track shoots to the hole with greenery on both sides. It’s such a clean straight line that I wonder if there’s a way back. Without much change, the end of the scenery comes closer and then passes by me. I just watch that repeat. Among the train’s clickety-clacks, I hear the kettle-like sound of the whistling wind.

We enter a tunnel. Like an explorer with a headlamp, the train only lights up a small area ahead. Inside, the tunnel undulates in brown like the back of a throat. After a while, I see white light ahead. As we approach it, brown, green, and blue come into sight and form a scenery. Looking at that, I suddenly understood that humans saw the world through light. Actually, it surprised me that such realization just hit me right then. The end of the tunnel nears and we come out.

Yayoi has been invited to join geology students from her university at a research retreat near the Springs by her friend Akane. There, she meditates on her feelings for an upperclassman Shimada who is already spoken for and is set to marry his girlfriend soon. She also dreamily contemplates bodies and personhood:

You notice various colors and shapes in diverse bodies when you’re naked. These bodies belong to different people. But when they all gather, you realize how our bodies are just the combinations of various body parts. Had I been a daughter of a butcher and lived near the ocean, I would have…

Would I have been the girl with a chubby tummy and tanned skin? All I saw in front of me were those different possibilities. Are those choices to be made, or have they been made? Are the choices made now or in the past? These bodies are mingling and doing their own thing. They enter the tub through white steam, wash their bodies, and walk around.

Surrounded by these bodies, I felt I could like myself more. Although my knee is bent, it remembers my 22 years much better than I can. This knee is mine. That’s how I feel now. I was getting dizzy, so I got out of the tub. My body felt lighter. The notion of my own body and my actual body finally matched in shape and content.

Such musings reinforce Happy’s underlying idea that randomly inherited, concrete distinctions make us who we are while also keeping us from ever being capable of absolutely knowing each other. Dually, it is because of these distinctions that we are kept from being entirely alone; each of us individuals, we are bonded by our shared solitude within ourselves.

It is in this way that the symbol of transit appears as the film’s core metaphor. Vehicles like the poster-pictured tram our characters ride in during the opening scene or the trains Yuzuki’s protagonist rides in during “Steam” are like our individual bodies, serving as vessels that we can look out from as we navigate the world but that we can never see into when encountered with another. Like in Ukai’s exercises, we may achieve physical closeness to other bodies but we cannot truly grasp the various Whitmanian multitudes resting inside them. Clearly, Hamaguchi observes vehicles as thematically rich devices. The Saab of Drive is evidence enough of this.

And to add to the limitedness of what we can ever know about each other, there is also death to be considered. The film’s title suggests several meanings to me. From one perspective, I understand it as referring to the period of time that we’re witnessing our characters traverse, all of them in the final few years before middle-agedness strikes, before their agency as essentially young people is potentially diminished. From a different, grimmer perspective, I can envision the title as addressing existence as a happy hour of sorts, a finite moment where we meet with friends to imbibe for our own, individual reasons - maybe merely to have fun, to drown some sorrows, to have a shared context to connect with other persons, etc. As it works into my transit-oriented reading of the film, a happy hour constructs a shared environment in which people are brought together briefly, never really getting close because of the contextual constraints. Yet this does not make the entire affair lackluster; the happy hour, life, is variously, all at once blissful and sad and so on. So when the train comes to a halt and we have to get off it’s par for the course, not a great tragedy but just how things are.

A different take on the transit symbol in the film views vehicles not as mechanisms of isolation but as socially conducive spaces. It is on the tram that our four characters sit for a finite time together until they reach their destination. The tram and, by extension, other vehicles appear as a micocosmic surrogate for the larger encompassing world, an environment that lasts as long as one is riding in a vehicle. The finite length of the ride allows those inside an opportunity to connect but promises nobody anything. As a result, perhaps the happy hour becomes the moment(s) in time that one person knows another, everyone equipped with the same contextually variable possibilities, their relationships with each other bound to end at least by death if not by some other chosen or imposed conclusion - e.g., divorce. Happy gives us an almost comically not brief time with its characters, certainly more time than any real-world happy hour would, and it’s all the better for it.

To prepare for this article, I transcribed the whole of Yuzuki Nose’s “Steam” reading. Click here to check it out.

I also want to acknowledge that there’s so much more to dwell upon with Happy. How could there not be? It’s more than five hours long. Maybe I’ll circle around to further conversation of it someday.