Feb 11 ,12
Four thirty-something female friends in the misty seaside city of Kobe navigate the unsteady currents of their work, domestic, and romantic lives. They speak solace in one another’s company, but a sudden revelation creates a rift, and rouses each woman to take stock. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s wise, precisely observed, compulsively watchable drama of friendship and midlife awakening runs over five hours, yet the leisurely duration is not an indulgence but a careful strategy—to show what other films leave out, to create a space for everyday moments that is nonetheless charged with possibility, and to yield an emotional density rarely available to a feature-length movie. Developed through workshops with a cast of mostly newcomers (the extraordinary lead quartet shared the Best Actress award at the Locarno Film Festival), and filled with absorbing sequences that flow almost in real time, Happy Hour has a novelistic depth and texture. But it’s also the kind of immersive, intensely moving experience that remains unique to cinema.
We are screening Happy Hour in 3 parts. You can watch it in over two or three sittings but you may be surprised to find yourself so immersed that you do not want to leave the theater. Part I is 105 min. Part II is 95 min. Part III is 115 min.
Extraordinary both in its artistry and in its dimensions. -The New Yorker
Hamaguchi is that rarity: a tough, exacting humanist who puts his characters through their paces, relentlessly pointing and counterpointing their actions, his elegantly tensile imagery serving to render them wholly explicable and mysterious in seemingly equal measure.
– Slant Magazine