Synopsis
Four women in their thirties reevaluate their relationships, both shared and private, after a startling revelation concerning one's marriage forces each of them to ask one of life's biggest questions: "Am I who I want to be?"
Happy Hour
2015 ‘ハッピーアワー’ Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
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Alternative Titles
Happî awâ, Senses 1&2, Senses 1 & 2, Senses 3&4, Senses 3 & 4, Senses 5, Senses 1 et 2, Senses 3 et 4, Happī awā, Happīawā, Happîawâ, 해피 아워, Счастливый час, 歡樂時光
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Spend enough time with people, and you think you know them. This is one of the greatest follies of being human: the arrogance of believing that by observing another person, one can fully understand the entirety of their existence. We make assumptions based on observable routine: she likes her coffee this way, he walks with this gait, they talk in some manner. And from those bits and pieces of visible behavior, from the scraps of half-remembered conversation, we form some manner of conclusion about the other. Yes, I know this person.
It is a dangerous assertion, because humans are an eternal mystery. And once we think we know something, we are no longer curious about it. The experiment is over,…
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At various moments, I was reminded of Rivette and Yang, which is just about the highest praise a movie can get.
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i wouldn’t say the runtime is a breeze but it’s exactly what it should & has to be. as more is revealed, you realize how little you know. i love how hamaguchi weaves themes into conversations, how he can hold off on showing a certain part of a room long enough that it feels like a revelation when the shot finally shifts, how much agency he gives all his characters. it just feels so human. you want to know everything but you can’t. we are limited even when we put our ear to someone’s guts & even when we allow strangers on the bus to tell us stories of their past. it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or not — we have to leave everything at some point and allow it to keep moving, and care for it by remembering, and hope for the best.
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these five hours honestly flew by and now i am in desperate need of five more i really don’t know how hamaguchi does it ??? he has very quickly become an all time favourite director of mine what an absolute master
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This is a world framed by unuttered agony simmering below the pretense of forced smiles, hollow politeness, and artificial rapport.
Facades of happiness concealing hulky emotional barriers. Contentment charades obscuring stifled passion.
Happy Hour explores the limits, messiness, and struggles intrinsic to human connection and intimacy. More specifically, this film is an incredibly restrained portrait of four women driven to the point of emotional bankruptcy and their diverging responses once they reach the point of feduppedness.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi is really out here making multiple masterpieces. Goddamn. This is a 317 minute film that wholly transports the viewer into a perpetually engrossing experience, to the point that you never want this glimpse into the daily lives of these women to end.…
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Riveting from start to finish. A five (un)happy hour movie about four 30-something women struggling to find happiness in their lives, and I bunked two classes just to finish it in one sitting. No regrets tho' because this is easily one of the best experiences I've ever had. Happy Hour is plain, laid-back, and genuine, yet also rewarding and incredibly profound. Hamaguchi's timing and ability to walk the line between the cinematic and the mundane along with his keen observation of the tiny nuances of everyday lives distinguishes him as a true artist and makes him one of my favourite directors working today. These four women had grown so much on me, so much so that I didn't want this to end. Sadly, time flies by when you're watching this, just like it does in real life.
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"characters are not the author. you yourself said so, and i understand that. but your work aims to transplant your physical sense into your text, accurately and faithfully. the limits of the writer's perception can be shown in the limits of the world shown in the work."
ryusuke hamaguchi excites me so much. the quality of his imagery is hard to articulate, but that's because he's one of the shockingly few filmmakers today that's willing to engage the viewer in communicating the processes behind the instinct behind the images, solely through those images. it's really remarkable how much he'll exploit casual irregularities in conventional framing and therefore allow compositions to invest in the myriad shapes of seemingly every physical object…
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One thing that I’ve realized about my taste over the years is that I enjoy the mundane aspects of life. I love seeing media that portrays people just living and breathing. Happy Hour was this but just so much bigger than that. I feel like I spent time with all these characters and watched them grow as time went on. It’s really an unmatched experience. I don’t know if this makes sense but I’ll stop now and just recommend this highly. My brain is goo rn because of the runtime so sorry for the brevity 😭