Happy Hour (2015)

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 lives of four 38-year-old women named Akari, Jun, Sakurako, and Fumi. 

This is not to suggest that everything that happens in Happy Hour is mundane.  The guest artists who present at Fumi’s workplace and Jun’s effort to divorce her husband are not events most people would consider routine.  But everything eventually passes and develops into something else.  Happy Hour‘s extreme length is worth sitting through not to reach a climax, but because of how much it captures about how the characters relate to each other, both in isolated moments and over time.

Each character’s story contains some element of domestic division.  Jun’s pending divorce is arguably the most prominent, but there’s also Fumi’s vaguely troubled relationship with her own husband, and Sakurako struggling to manage her teenage son.  As for Akari, the film shows us her work life more than her home life, but we do learn that she has a history of divorce as well. 

This through-line complements the way the characters behave depending on where they are and who they’re with.  Sometimes they’re comfortable and playful.  Sometimes they self-monitor, restricting themselves for the sake of politeness.  Sometimes they’re bluntly honest.  Though there’s some friction between the four main characters, their interactions among themselves are generally the most amicable and unforced. 

Carefully watching the conversations in Happy Hour unfold reveals very subtle delineations between modes of behavior.  Superficial politeness vs. thoughtfulness.  Careful attention to interpersonal rituals vs. unthinking conformity.  Harsh truths revealed out of hostility vs. harsh truths revealed out of concern.  All kinds of murky differences are clarified by the end of the film, but not in any single moment.  Only by looking back on everything that's happened, on who has stuck together or not, can you see it. 

These issues crossed with Happy Hour‘s recurring theme of domestic dissolution imply both a need and an opportunity for change.  Moreover, it’s all contextualized by environmental crisis, the characters’ gripes about their traditional obligations, and concern for Japan’s aging population.  Such things are referenced only briefly, but they do well to establish the historical and political backdrop for the currents of change that define Happy Hour.

What Happy Hour articulates through details of behavior it also articulates cinematically.  The connections between emotional well-being, relationships, and setting are articulated in cuts away from personal problems to the elaborate network of roads and lights that compose the city at night. Sometimes, in brief scenes following tense or awkward conversations, moments of peace or camaraderie are accented with color or a flare of light breaking into view.

In one montage, there's a match cut from the motion of a seal swimming past the glass at a zoo to the similar motion of a kite flown by children.  The relation between adult leisure and the play of children recalls a comparison made earlier in the film: a guest artist comes to Fumi’s workplace to give a strange exercise lesson that involves a lot of interpersonal physical contact.  Later, Akari diffuses the awkwardness of this by saying it reminds her of children’s games, like patty-cake.

Emphasizing playful, exploratory moments like this is another way Happy Hour interlaces the potential for change through relationships with the delicateness of the task of working out who's really on your side.  And considering where the film ends up, it amounts to a persuasive affirmation of the main characters’ friendship.  Though the film finds many ways to put them to the test over the course of its five-hour run time, Akari, Jun, Sakurako, and Fumi still find that they have a place with each other.

The original version of this review is posted here.  The version that appears here is somewhat modified.