Connecting with the Audience: Happy Hour (2015)

Guest Writer Jeongrak Son unravels the 317 minutes of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Happy Hour (2015).

Common advice to writers and directors, at least according to my writer/director friend, often includes "show as little as possible to get your point across" or "cut the fat and kill your darlings". I disagree. Tangential scenes, even those that do not directly advance the plot, can elevate a film. In fact, these scenes are often more important than the plot itself. 

A marvellous example is Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 317-minute Japanese film, Happy Hour (2015). It tracks the lives of four female friends, all 37-year-olds. They each lead rather different lives, yet none of them are properly listened to by the people around them, including those who are closest to them. The entire film is a process of these four women attempting to communicate with people around them, realise that they are not heard by those people, and decide to change that.

Since there are four main characters, who each have their own subplots, there is much to unravel in the film. Some events are more momentous, at least for the overarching plot, than others. A conventional director would invest more time and resources into those scenes. An interesting director, however, would create their own rhythm. Hamaguchi composed four different yet interconnected stories, weaving the same motif into a five-hour film undulating with his own rhythm.

The most pronounced section is the one where Hamaguchi decides to slow down. Near the beginning of the film, before any real event takes place, our four main women attend a bizarre eclectic workshop run by a charismatic but questionable instructor who became famous for balancing objects. Surprisingly, the workshop is incredibly detailed in its entirety, with minimal editing for about half an hour. During the workshop, participants engage in various activities: from balancing objects to balancing each other's force, recognising the invisible space between them, or even noticing small sounds each other's gut makes. 

To comprehend why this is striking, we need to recall the relationship between diegetic and real time. Typically, the plot of a film spans a timescale much longer than the film's duration, with only a fraction of events presented to the audience. Even within a single event, only a few fragments of it survive the editing process. Watching them consciously, many scenes are merely signifiers of what happened in the diegetic world: having a few bites of food signifies that characters are having a meal, while sexual intercourse is signified by passionate kisses and moaning. While effective, much of the meaning is not communicated explicitly, but just implied by relying on pre-existing images audiences have developed after years of watching films. At its worst, an entire film seems like it is just ticking boxes casting each character as a one-dimensional “type”.

Sometimes films like Happy Hour could avoid this type of efficient editing when they remember to. A film’s audience is subject to whatever temporal rhythm directors intend. Unless they walk out during the screening, the audience must endure the pace at which the film unfolds. For instance, in this workshop scene, we are forced to observe the characters spending time truly listening to each other. Just like the characters, who discover new sensations from these activities, we encounter different filmic experiences when we observe the film as-is, without too many semiotics intercepting it. This process acclimates the audience to the rest of the film, where characters strive to tell their stories. In a film where frankness is celebrated to the point that two of the main characters unapologetically admit to having an affair, it is crucial to put the audience in the right frame of mind. Only when the audience is willing to listen to the smallest sounds from one’s gut, can they see through the ostensible layer of societal norms and understand other people wholly, albeit fictional. Obviously, it is a technique that needs to be used sparingly. Gaspar Noé's tender film Love (2015) exemplifies how the same technique cannot redeem an empty experience. In this film, the role of the workshop scene in Happy Hour—a film that grew out of the real workshop sessions Hamaguchi and the actors held—is occupied by the extensive sex scenes (between the main characters Murphy, Electra, and Omi) that are almost captured in real time and somewhat ‘real’, as they are unsimulated. Although these scenes are powerful enough to initially make the audience invested in the characters' relationships, it is hard to maintain that engagement as the film spirals down into Murphy's incoherent and sporadic recollections of the past. It also does not help that "Murphy is, like some of Noé’s previous blank slate heroes, a character who remembers himself at his most frustratingly vacant" as Simon Abrams pointed out. This dissociating character hinders the audience's ability to care about the minute details and to understand the characters, which I believe is the foundation upon which these slower real-time scenes can be powerful.

In summary, even seemingly tangential scenes can establish a genuine connection between the audience and the film when executed with a generous amount of screen time. If the rest of the film possesses sufficient content to utilise that connection, as in Happy Hour, these scenes yield a greater effect than any efficient editing. I would love to see more filmmakers have the courage to forgo efficiency and venture into the realm where the real and filmic worlds blur together.