Sprawling, intimate conversations are crucial in the dialogue-driven films of Hamaguchi Ryusuke, but that which remains concealed—simmering behind a strategic facade, sheepish deception, or playful pretense—can be just as revealing. Consider the pivotal dinner conversation that takes place after a communication workshop in the 317-minute Happy Hour (2015), when Jun (Kawamura Rira) suddenly discloses the shocking news of her upcoming divorce trial and owns up to her infidelity to her callous husband. In Asako I & II (2018), the title character’s former lover Baku reappears in the person of her new boyfriend Ryohei—a completely different man in spirit and temperament, yet physically the same as her ex. Asako (Karata Erika) keeps this connection a secret, afraid that her partner might consider their relationship a sham, and herself unwilling or unable to come to terms with the muddled nature of her desires.
Through these patterns of withholding and release, and in the friction between make-believe and reality, Hamaguchi seeks to access slippery truths about the nature of yearning. In the Silver Bear-winning , he considers the power of playing pretend across three discrete acts, applying his deceptively breezy approach to the stories of a trio of women at decisive junctures in their lives. continues the director’s interest in middleclass womanhood in all its shades and contradictions—a—but unlike that durational epic, or ’s high-concept deconstruction of romantic fantasy, there is a new buoyancy to Hamaguchi’s latest, a feeling signalled by the title’s evocation of a carnival wheel.
