Device Notes

To say The Seventh Victim leaves a lot to the imagination would be misleading. It certainly leaves out information we can sense would be relevant, but it also leaves in details that activate and guide the imagination.  It’s only 71 minutes long because it’s a film of few words, keeping things condensed. One character commands another, “drink your milk”, sounding exasperated for no clear reason. One character sees another and her expression immediately changes, restrained but showing confusion and dread. These two scenes can easily be linked and speculated upon, but the film gives us little more directly. While we’re left to infer what relationships the characters have lived through, what we mainly see for the first half of the film is their work and their living arrangements. During the daytime, New York City seems normal. At night, it changes. Places that have clear purposes during the day empty out and gain new and terrible possibilities. There’s no telling what will emerge from ...

  I discussed this film with at length with some friends.  I said, based on Happy Hour , Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy , and this film, that a hallmark of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's work is the portrayal of ambiguous conversations, where we observe characters' words and body language at length, but cannot tell exactly what they mean in the moment.  Only in retrospect, having gained context from seeing the many facets of their lives and the lives of their interlocutors, does anything become clear.   One of my friends was struck by the conversation Kafuku and Takatsuki have in Kafuku's car, where what matters is not just Takatsuki's words, but the look on his face and the tension in his body.  And part of the film's premise is that Kafuku directs plays in which the actors don't all speak the same language.  The actors' performance depends on reaction to nonverbal cues, so it becomes even more emphasized in this film than Hamaguchi's others. Another f...

Happy Hour builds its five hours and seventeen minutes largely out of conversations.  We often find the characters discuss their problems at home or at work and relating those problems to wandering thoughts that occur to them while they talk.  They’ll do this for 10 or 20 minutes before the film moves on to a new setting.  There are plenty of scenes depicting wordless leisure, workplace drama, or legal conflicts, but Happy Hour ‘s texture is born mainly in conversations: the tones of the characters’ voice, where they’re sitting, how their faces are lit, and what unspoken details emerge in their body language.  The film often has us face the characters head-on as they talk.  The topics of these conversations range from personal beliefs to self-care advice to politics.  Happy Hour does not give any one of these topics more importance than another.  The topics themselves aren't exactly the focus.  They happen to arise in the everyday liv...