Not the Universe's Most "Happy Hour"

 Hello!

In March I shared my delightful journey down the pleasant rabbit hole of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda's movies, as well as my attempt to watch a wide range of movies guided by a series of curated lists of best foreign and independent films.  Intrigued by how deeply I enjoyed Kore-eda's films and inspired to take on a challenge by one of those lists, I decided to try out another Japanese director's opus: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's 5+ hour-long (and therefore misnomerly-named) "Happy Hour" (2015).

Of course, even with the slumberiest infant, a 5-hour movie takes a while to watch.  Breaking the movie into little chunks here and there over several days, I was at first drawn into the subtle intricacies of the friendships between four women in their mid-thirties which form the heart of "Happy Hour".  I was particularly interested by the sequence somewhere near the end of the first third or so of the movie, wherein the four friends, played by Sachie Tanaka, Hazuki Kikuchi, Maiko Mihara, and Rira Kawamura, attend a workshop with an artist who engages them in a series of experiential exercises designed to increase interpersonal attunement.  

In one of these exercises, the participants slowly walk in a circle together while facing each other, tasked with keeping each other evenly spaced while participants enter and leave their circular formation.  In one silent moment, a participant steps away and their group of four becomes three.  The remaining three women subtly shift their movements to accommodate their group's smaller size while still moving.  It was at once so quiet and so breathtaking--almost so quiet I could have missed it, and breathtaking in the tantalizing foreshadowing it offered for the story to come.

And now, having finished the movie, I'm sorry to say that the deliciousness of that cinematic moment simply isn't worth the work of finishing a movie this long.  Yes, that moment accurately foreshadows the disappearance of one of the four friends and resultant shifts in the lives of the three women left behind.  But unfortunately, in retrospect, what that scene that so took my breath away was actually foreshadowing was a series of ham-fisted moments of forced symbolism and concocted emotion that ultimately fall profoundly flat, interspersed with at times punishingly long passages that accomplish little in moving the story forward.  

For example: you watch a reading at which a young author reads an entire short story from beginning to end.  Which begs the question: Why.  But also:

I hate to say it, but the performances also fail to sustain the extraordinary length of "Happy Hour".  To the contrary, most of them are aggressively flattened to the point of almost feeling like an early read of the script.  At what should have been the most heightened moments of the movie, it seems as if the actors are just going through the motions--a slap on the face of one of the women's child rings so hollow it's instead a slap in the audience's face.  

It's possible this is simply a byproduct of this movie's direction--an artistic choice Ryûsuke Hamaguchi tends to make in his movies rather than a reflection of the cast's acting abilities.  It's also possible I'm somehow missing something, since my exasperation with this movie is definitely not shared by everyone.  Unfortunately, I'm sufficiently burned by the underwhelming factor multiplied by the time I'll never get back factor of "Happy Hour" that I'm not sure I'll risk checking out any of his other work, especially when I've now learned that sleepy babies get much less sleepy the older they get.

I wish I could give "Happy Hour" a warmer rating, because I truly wanted to like it.  After slogging through it, there's just no escaping that it left me quite disappointed.  I gave this movie a 2.

{Heart}