Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi has been beavering away as a writer-director of thoughtful arthouse films since the early 2000s. As a student in 2007, he made his own version of Solaris, the Stanislaw Lem sci-fi classic adapted previously by both Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. Last year he moved up to the premier league with the immaculate Drive My Car, an accolade-earner from the moment it premiered in Cannes right up until this week when it received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and put Hamaguchi in the running for Best Director.
His previous film from 2021, the portmanteau package Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, doesn’t shimmer with quite the same perfection, but it still has plenty of spark and shine as it sifts through different kinds of love in contemporary Japan. As with Drive My Car, there’s a strong streak of theatre in Hamaguchi’s favouring of long, dialogue-driven scenes between pairs of characters, but here the camerawork is a little choppier, even resorting to the odd, jarring zoom.
The emotional palette, however, is subtly shaded. The opening story finds model Meiko (Kotone Furukawa) listening to her best friend Tsugumi (Hyunri) rhapsodising over a man she has just met who is nursing a broken heart. This stirs Meiko to seek out her own ex-boyfriend, and a little bit of cinematic magic allows her to try out different endings to her own story. The telling of tales is also central to the second instalment, in which mature student Nao’s (Katsuki Mori) impish plan to “honeytrap” a professor (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) by reading his own erotic prose to him backfires, in part because of a misspelled email address.
In the final and strongest story, a woman (Aoba Kawai) comes back to her hometown for a high-school reunion, hoping to see someone dear to her she lost long ago. She thinks she’s spotted her at the local railway station, but is this other woman (Fusako Urabe) all that she seems? The two oblige one another with play-acting in order to uncork secrets never told.
The conceit is simple, but it’s pulled off so flawlessly here it feels like a story you’ve always known written by Hamaguchi’s beloved Anton Chekhov. (Uncle Vanya plays a key role in Drive My Car.) “Don’t tell me the Moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass,” Chekhov once wrote, and Hamaguchi knows how to angle his dramatic shards just right to reveal far larger dramas beyond the frame.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from February 11
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