Happy Hour, dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi (2015)

(Un)Happy Hour(s)

When I was younger, I measured time in SpongeBob episodes. A trip to the grocery store was three episodes. Going to school was one or two. Driving to the beach was four, maybe five. Going to New York from Virginia was—well, you get the idea.

Happy Hour, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2015 film, is around thirty episodes. Maybe more. At just over five hours, its runtime is Herculean. 2024’s The Brutalist, the latest zeitgeisty long movie, is just over three-and-a-half hours. Instead of watching Happy Hour, you could watch The Brutalist, take an hour nap, cook dinner, and have some time left over for whatever it is you do when you have time left over. Maybe take a walk. Maybe write a letter. Maybe take another nap. 

Instead of this, you should watch Happy Hour. Though Hamaguchi has gone on to make more successful and widely watched films since its initial release (Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist), Happy Hour still has much to teach us about patience and the importance of  being heard. That is, if we are willing to sit down and listen.

“I was trying to listen to others, and others were trying to listen to me. That was a nice feeling.”*

Happy Hour is not happy, nor an hour. Ostensibly, the film concerns four women in Kobe, Japan. The women are of similar ages but have disparate professions. Akari is a nurse. Fumi works as an  arts administrator. Sakurako is a housewife. Jun is Jun. Each character inhabits their own world, with its own cast of occasionally overlapping secondary characters. Akari reluctantly helps train a younger nurse, Yuzuki. Fumi is concerned with her husband’s growing interest in a younger novelist, whom he edits professionally, by the name of Ms. Nose. Sakurako wanders around her home and feels herself drifting away from her teenage son Daiki. Jun, the keystone of the friend  group who introduced everyone to one another, floats along throughout the movie, wondering how to best express the secrets she’s held onto for so long.

Happy Hour is many things, but it is never boring. Promises are made and broken, romances are developed (and ended), and each of the four women has the time to sit in silence, to make losing arguments, to listen through closed doors.The strength of Happy Hour’s immense runtime exists in these moments of grace. Scenes begin to feel less like finite moments and more like glimpses of life in perpetual motion. 


Imagine, for a moment, that you are driving a car on a long journey. You are alone, with music playing quietly through the stereo. As time goes on, you notice smaller and smaller details of the cars and world around you. You notice the two children asleep in the backseat of an SUV. You notice a  busy businessman driving along, yelling at no one in particular. You notice that the store along the  highway you used to visit has long since closed. Moments like these are what Happy Hour is all  about. It is about middle age and friendship, sure, but most of all, it is about the transcendent power of listening in on the moments that make up daily life.

Author Bryan Washington, writing on Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car, notices how, “In working to see one another clearly, the characters instead walk away with a clearer understanding of themselves. Rather than attempting to define love, Hamaguchi’s film shows us that, by gaining a sense of ourselves, we can find a clearer sense of how and why we love others.” The characters in Happy Hour are always just on the verge of understanding through listening. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But the more they try to communicate, the more they cast long shadows, with the contrast bringing their being into ever sharper focus.

 
Happy Hour.

In an extended scene in the film’s first act, the four women assemble at Fumi’s behest to attend a workshop led by a “balance artist.” The artist, named Ukai, has recently become semi-famous for walking around the disaster site of Fukushima and balancing  rocks and other debris along the shore. Fumi has invited him to give a workshop on  “unconventional means of communication.” He demonstrates his technique to the workshop—how by placing his chair just so, he can find its center of balance and leave it standing impossibly upright. 

This same technique is elaborated upon through further workshop exercises. Pairs are made to sit  back-to-back and help each other stand without using their arms. They are instructed to touch  foreheads and attempt to communicate a secret word solely through their thoughts. Finally, they  attempt to listen to each other’s physical center, near their stomach. “I can hear your guts,” one of the women comments. Some of them laugh, and others just listen. Some do both. 

The workshop soon ends, and the women reflect on their experiences. Sakurako tells Ukai, “I  wasn’t completely sure what we were doing. But I was trying to listen to others, and others were  listening to me. That was a nice feeling. It’s rare when others are willing to listen to you in everyday life. It was nice to know others cared about me.” Akari, a nurse, similarly confesses how she never really tried to understand how her touch might affect her patients, until now. She considers how touch is something extended from one person and received by another. In a later scene, she asks her trainee what the patients in the hospital die from. Yuzuki confesses she isn’t quite sure what she’s asking. “They die from loneliness,” Akari tells her. It is up to them, she explains to Yuzuki, to make them feel heard.


The kaleidoscopic moments presented in Happy Hour stand tall and clear ten years after the film’s release. No film in the decade since has approached its level of patience and tenderness. It should be mentioned that the genesis for Happy Hour is rooted in an acting workshop Hamaguchi led in 2013. The workshop, in Hamaguchi’s telling, was not focused on “acting lessons,” but instead on training everyone “to become professional listeners.” The actors were encouraged to go out into the city and interview strangers or people they were otherwise interested in. In addition, the actors spent time interviewing each other, and it is this balancing of “expression and listening” that lends Happy Hour its verisimilitude, even when events in the movie defy belief or expectation.

Hamaguchi’s casting of non-actors in Happy Hour (in the same vein as American director Sean Baker of The Florida Project and Anora) is an elaboration of the listening exercises explored in his 2013 workshop. When the central four women were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to properly act out Hamaguchi’s script, he rewrote it. Then he rewrote it again. And again. He rewrote the script for Happy Hour at least seven times, each time in effort to make the actors more comfortable and assured in their roles. If that isn’t an act of listening, what is?

Much like balance artist Ukai’s workshop, Happy Hour is an experiment in unconventional communication. Though exceptional in its length and production, it charges audiences with the simplest of tasks: it asks them to sit in on these acts of listening, perhaps for longer than they are used to. By the end of the film, it dawns on us that not only is listening to others no simple feat, but neither is listening to ourselves.

“Is it possible to represent the world, and not just myself?” a character wonders aloud near the film’s conclusion. Ryusuke Hamaguchi doesn’t have an answer to this. But for him, just trying is enough.


* Quote from Happy Hour (2015).