Sunday, April 2 | 1 pm
A quietly audacious and utterly assured work of independent slow-cinema by prodigious thirty-eight-year-old director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Happy Hour follows four thirty-something female friends—a nurse, an event planner, and two homemakers—as they navigate their busy professional and domestic lives in and around Kobe, Japan. When one member of the group reveals that she is seeking a divorce, the other three women are prompted to reevaluate their own goals and desires. Luxuriating in its five-hour running time, Happy Hour trains its unhurried gaze on the quotidian details of female existence that commercial cinema tends to minimize or elide. Buoyed by remarkable performances from its four leads—non-professional actresses discovered at an improvisational theater workshop—who shared the Best Actress prize at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, Happy Hour crafts complex, fully-realized characters and nuanced relationships, building to a slow-burn melodramatic climax that is riveting, satisfying, and ultimately profound.
Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi 2015 Japan 317 minutes NRÂ DCP
