Failure to Communicate: on Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's HAPPY HOUR

It's impossible to live a life that doesn't hurt anyone. Make yourself as small as possible, suppress every desire you might have, give up everything you are for another person, and you're still denying that person the chance to know you completely. How do you communicate who you are and what you want to another person? Can someone love another person without knowing them?

These are big questions, but at a five hour-plus runtime,  Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Happy Hour is a big film. The story follows four friends in their 30s: tough, divorced Akari (Sachie Tanaka) who seems happy without a romantic partner; quiet Sakurako (​​Hazuki Kikuchi) living a dissatisfying existence as a housewife and mother; serious Fumi (Maiko Mihara) who likes to keep her work as an arts administrator separate from her husband's work as an editor; and Jun (Rira Kawamura), whose complicated love life pushes the rest of the women to re-examine their own unhappiness.

On Fumi's suggestion, the group attends a workshop led by Mr. Ukai (Shuhei Shibata), an "artist" whose claim to fame was balancing individual pieces of debris on a beach. Ukai pushes the class to attempt new ways of communicating with each other: sitting back-to-back with a partner and standing up together, mirroring your "center line" with a partner, listening to each other's guts, and touching foreheads to try to read each other's minds.

It's a bit of a mix between a mandatory team bonding exercise at a corporate event and a sales pitch for one of the more mild cults (Landmark forum, maybe), and it's treated as such within the movie, too. But, like most of those events, there's some truth hidden in there. It feels good to be touched. It feels good to try to communicate your inner truth to someone else, especially if it's in a different way than you're used to. It feels good to be celebrated for trying something.

Most of the characters in the film speak in blunt sentences, but that shouldn't be mistaken for them being overly honest. It speaks to their stunted ability to communicate their true feelings that even those sentences that seem clear and true can't really be trusted. In fact, it seems like there are only a few moments in Happy Hour where you can really trust that a character is speaking the truth. It happens when a character is centered within the frame and looking straight at the camera, matching Ukai's exercise in which the participants need to mirror their own center line with their partner's. Ironically, these centered moments don't necessarily occur when characters are in tune with each other; it seems to happen when characters are able to truly express what they mean. It's not the truth, but it's the truth to them. But these moments of clear communication don't lead to a deeper understanding between them. Is being true to yourself really helping you be true to others? And even if you can speak your truth, that doesn't mean the other person is really listening.

As Ukai says in his workshop, communication must be "sent" and "received," and as each woman examines her own life and desires, there are communication problems on both ends. Sakurako tells Fumi, "I just want to be noticed," as her housekeeping and status as a dutiful housewife are taken for granted. Akari's harsh scolding of her nurse protege is kept at a remove from the deep passion she holds toward the profession. Fumi talks in circles around what she wants when she's not silent entirely. As they realize their own dreams and desires, as they "send" out their feelings, it doesn't necessarily mean that anyone will listen.

Ukai's class might have featured communication exercises, but it was fundamentally about finding your own center, and these moments seem to hint that the characters have found that, at least. The same's not the case for Ukai; his skill was balancing an object entirely on itself, not bound to anything and so fragile that even a gust could blow it over. Ukai's existence is the natural endpoint of that philosophy, an empty and selfish man who follows his own desires with no thought given toward anyone else's wants or needs. Finding your center and balancing on yourself means forgoing your attachments, being unafraid to hurt those around you, accepting the fragility of your own existence. Change is a violent thing; does the caterpillar turn into the butterfly or does the caterpillar die so the butterfly can be born? The answer's not clear in the film, but the answer's not clear in real life, either.

Hamaguchi largely keeps the camera flat and the shots long, forcing you to pay close attention to every small gesture that an actor makes. When you spend time observing someone, you interpret their pauses, their tiny movements, the tone of their voice, the direction of their eyes. What is the other person trying to communicate? What are they trying to keep secret? Can you even know, or can you only see your own reflection in their affect?

The time spent with the characters and the time you spend watching them exist in the frame is part of what the film's about. We're given 317 minutes with these characters, time enough to learn the rhythms of their lives and know some of their deepest shames and closely-guarded secrets. But you can know someone for 25 years and never really know them for who they are. If there are conclusions to be reached, they're almost indistinguishable from the questions being asked. Maybe, like the forehead exercise the characters play, it's enough to make a close guess to what the other person is thinking and be thankful for that. You can't ever make yourself fully known, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.