Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour film about a widowed theatre director, his young driver and a multilingual Uncle Vanya is quiet, exact and, late on, more moving than we expected. It says too much aloud near the end. See it anyway.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi has taken a short story by Haruki Murakami and made a film that runs 179 minutes, and it is worth the whole of your evening. It is not slow in the way people mean when they warn you about a slow film. Things happen in it constantly, to people who have decided not to react, and the film waits for the moment when one of them does.
Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage actor and director in Tokyo. His wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) writes for television, and the stories she tells him after sex become her scripts. He learns his lines in his red Saab from a cassette she has recorded of Uncle Vanya, every part but his. Hamaguchi and his co-writer Takamasa Ōe spend about forty minutes on this marriage before the title card, and it is the best-judged opening we have seen in a while: a home, a habit, a thing glimpsed through a doorway and never mentioned. Then Oto dies. Two years later Kafuku is in Hiroshima, directing Vanya with a cast speaking Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Korean Sign Language, and being driven by a young woman he did not ask for.
The driver is Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), from Hokkaido, cap pulled low, and Miura plays her so quietly it takes an hour to see how much she is doing. Kafuku’s first remark about her is that he cannot feel the car move. Hidetoshi Shinomiya and Lee Tae-hun shoot the Saab from outside at night, a red box on grey expressway, and from the back seat by day, two faces in the mirror not looking at each other. Seo Hyeon-Seon gives the rehearsal room a long table, bare walls and a window onto the water, so the reading sessions look like work. Haruki Koketsu puts Kafuku in greys and Misaki in one dark jacket for the whole film.
Kafuku’s method is to have the cast read the play flat, round the table, with no feeling, for days. Hamaguchi lets us sit through enough of it to share the actors’ impatience. Then Lee Yoo-na (Park Yu-rim), who plays Sonya in Korean Sign Language, and Janice Chang (Sonia Yuan), who plays Yelena in Mandarin, run a scene on a park bench, and Kafuku stops the rehearsal to say that something happened. It had. We were moved more than we can quite account for, by two women doing Chekhov at each other in languages neither shares, and the reason is the flatness that came before. The film has trained us the way Kafuku trains his cast.
Jin Dae-yeon plays Gong Yoon-su, the festival’s Korean coordinator, who interprets and frets and gets the one dinner scene that made us laugh aloud. Masaki Okada plays Kōshi Takatsuki, the young television actor Kafuku casts as Vanya without saying why. Okada is handsome, eager and slightly wrong in every scene, and late on he is given a long speech in the back of the car, held on his face, that we will not describe. It is the best acting in the film, and Nishijima, listening, does not blink. Eiko Ishibashi’s score, with Yoshitaka Fujimoto, is a soft run of drums, bass and electric piano that arrives over the driving and stays out of the flat and the rehearsal room. Azusa Yamazaki cuts to the pace of the car, long on the road and shorter indoors. We did not check the time.
The flaw is in the last hour. Kafuku and Misaki take a long drive north, and what they have carried in silence for two hours they now say to each other in full sentences. It is well acted and well written and it is more than we needed, because Chekhov had already said it. A few critics found this stretch melodramatic. We would not go that far, but the film that trusted us in the car does not quite trust us in the snow. There is also a coda, which we will not describe, that puzzled us on first viewing and has stayed with us since.
Hamaguchi has made long films about people talking before, Happy Hour in 2015 among them, and this is the most controlled thing he has done: fewer people, fewer rooms, one car. It is a 15 certificate, for sex that is talked over more than shown, and it is three hours. Do not split it across two evenings. The last hour only works if you have sat through the first two.
