Ryusuke Hamaguchi

A fine and delicate mix of intricate drama and outspoken narratives. The actors do a great job, but it's Hamaguchi who finds the perfect balance between narrative intrigue and emotional drama. Smart direction, beautifully executed and powerful when it needs to be. Not for everyone, but the film won me over in no time.

Before taking a stab at Hamaguchi's latest success, I figured it would be fun to catch up with this little anthology project. What you get are three unrelated short stories that are very minute in scope and driven by strong performances. This isn't usually my preferred type of cinema, but the contrast between the blunt honesty of the characters and their excessively prim, solemn composure is pretty riveting. The shorts are very similar in style and structure and Hamaguchi fails his chance to experiment with form, but when the quality is consistently high, that's hardly a negative.

Good film, but it begs the question of how many Japanese dramas people have seen. It sticks to conventions pretty neatly and apart from weaving in a play (which wasn't very subtle), it's a very solid but textbook example of what Japanese dramas deliver and how they go about delivering it.

Hamaguchi's latest is another decent film. I'm still unsure of why he became the token Japanese drama director of our times, but here we are. Evil Does Not Exist is another slow-moving drama, with a rural twist. It's pretty basic drama fare, with an archetypical arthouse ending tacked on.

There's a lot of good things here, at its best it's a drama that reminded me of Tokyo.sora. But the running time is simply indefensible and there's simply too much dialogue for a Japanese film. The acting is great though and the characters are interesting, but give Hamaguchi some scissors.

An early TV project by the venerable Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. It's a pretty simple setup for a drama, but Hamaguchi is rather good at drawing out simple setups. The TV roots of the film aren't working in its favor, but at the same time, I've seen much worse, so kudos to Hamaguchi for dealing with that variable rather efficiently.