Chance Encounters

Beginning October 23, the Walker presents Ryūsuke Hamaguchi: Effect and Cause, an extensive survey of the Oscar-winning director’s films. Starting with an intimate, in-depth conversation between Hamaguchi and Toronto International Film Festival curator Andréa Picard, the series spans Happy Hour (2015), his international breakout feature, through Drive My Car (2021), winner of the 2022 Academy Award for Best International Feature, and GIFT (2023), an exploration of music and film featuring a live performance by collaborating composer Eiko Ishibashi. To bring greater context to the series and Hamaguchi’s work, we invited Devika Girish, the co-editor of Film Comment and a Talks programmer for the New York Film Festival, to tease out the threads of connection within these films.

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi structures his films around coincidences. In Happy Hour (2015), a man dies in a car crash immediately after his wife breaks up with him. In Asako I & II (2018), a woman falls in love with a man who looks exactly like her deceased former lover. In Drive My Car (2021), a man’s wife passes away abruptly right before the couple are about to have a conversation—presumably about the wife’s infidelity, which is not at all a secret to the husband. In Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021), a name misspelled by a single letter changes the fates of two characters. And in All of a Sudden (2026), the director of a French nursing home, who happens to be fluent in Japanese, happens to run into a Japanese boy with autism on the streets of Paris.

These accidents, whether happy or sad, catalyze important plotlines or character arcs in the Japanese auteur’s films. There is something so perfectly orchestrated about them that they seem wondrous, like a cascade of falling stars. Or they can seem a bit too convenient: unrealistic causes contrived to produce certain effects. This is why coincidences are the currency of melodramas, a genre that abounds with sudden twists of fate. As the scholar Peter Brooks argues in his foundational 1976 book, The Melodramatic Imagination, Hollywood melodramas of the ’60s and ’70s attempted to resacralize a secular and enlightened Western world, disenchanted with spirituality and divinity, and impart it with a sense of moral design. Those movies often rely on a sudden, miraculous occurrence to move or resolve a plot—a contrivance sometimes called deus ex machina, or “god from a machine.”

Yet Hamaguchi’s films do not play out like Hollywood melodramas, no matter the director’s stated love for Douglas Sirk. In the classical melodramatic form, coincidences produce heightened emotions, transformations, and outbursts. Often, the opposite happens in Hamaguchi’s films. When, in Happy Hour, a woman loses her husband in a motor accident minutes after kicking him out of the house, she is strangely calm. Her friend assures her that it’s not her fault, but guilt doesn’t seem to be on her mind at all. When a married woman in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy hits “send” on an email with a mistyped name—an error we know will have terrible consequences—Hamaguchi cuts straight to the woman on a bus two years later, withholding the immediate impact of her mistake.

The causes may be overtly orchestrated, but the immediate effects are often unexpected or elided altogether. This is because coincidences are not plot devices in Hamaguchi’s films. Rather, they are discoveries that reveal themselves to those who pay attention, as he explained in a recent lecture. Their beauty, even when tragic, evokes pleasure akin to that of chancing upon an instance of perfect symmetry, like a four-leaf clover, or hearing a harmonious melody. In the lecture, Hamaguchi used shots from Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), which he described as his favorite film, and Early Spring (1956) to detail the carefully reconstructed coincidences that alchemize even the most banal and ordinary of scenes: three characters exiting the frame through different doors at the same time or pedestrians in the background crossing a street in a particular rhythm that rhymes with an exchange between two protagonists in the foreground.

Happy Hour, Hamaguchi’s sprawling, five-hour breakout fiction feature, concerns four middle-aged women taking stock of their relationships, vocations, and dreams. It emerged from “listening” workshops Hamaguchi conducted with a group of nonprofessional actors in Kobe, which he also dramatizes in the movie itself. Early on, the four women participate in a workshop organized by an eccentric artist who encourages them to explore communicating in unusual ways: pressing an ear against someone’s navel to listen to their gut, looking straight into another’s eyes and sending a wordless message; sitting on the floor with backs pressed against each other and finding the right balance to rise together. In post-workshop conversations, revelations emerge about struggling marriages and brewing resentments, and these slowly expand, rhizomatically, into a web of interconnected plotlines.

Does the session with the artist loosen these revelations from the characters? It’s hard to say for sure if this is a matter of causality or mere chronology. Hamaguchi has said that two formative experiences shaped his approach to Happy Hour. The first was making a film called Intimacies with a group of acting students at the Enbu Seminar in Japan, where he was teaching a three-month course. He soon realized that the more time he spent with the aspiring actors and the more he learned about their lives, the more the project became about cheering them up or provoking certain emotions rather than producing a film. The second decisive experience was filming a tripartite documentary about the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake with codirector Kō Sakai. Hamaguchi discovered that the best exchanges happened when they had several chances to interview the same person and demonstrated interest in these individuals as people—and not just disaster “victims” or “survivors.”

Time and listening: these two pillars of Hamaguchi’s method are on display in Happy Hour. The film was improvised with nonprofessional actors, and watching it, one feels an intensified sense of presence—of life and narrative unfolding one moment at a time without any clear indication of direction or destination. A long author talkback is filmed in its entirety, almost in real time; it is digressive, going deep into the on-screen writer’s philosophy and particularly her commitment to noticing fleeting, ephemeral moments of everyday life without trying to contain or elongate them. Meanwhile, the eccentric artist who was meant to moderate the Q&A has abruptly left with one of the four protagonists for a club. The estranged husband of another protagonist (who, by this point, is pregnant and missing) has to step in, and a third protagonist, the event’s organizer, spends the evening grappling with an unspoken realization about her marriage.

Multiple different events, some dramatic and others mundane, unfold at the same time—much like the background extras in Early Spring who walk indifferently, separately, and yet in rhythm with the foreground protagonists. The strange pleasure of watching this long scene does not derive from fitting all its parts together or figuring out allegories; it comes simply in witnessing, through the calibrations of cinema, how things can coincide in life—sometimes with effect and at other times not.

Scenes of performances, lectures, and plays recur across Hamaguchi’s oeuvre. Drive My Car, which propelled him to an Oscar nomination, is a lush, novelistic tale of a Tokyo-based theater director working on a multilingual adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for a drama festival in Hiroshima. The rehearsals in the film mirror the “listening” workshops of Happy Hour. The actors are from different parts of Asia, and each reads their lines in their own language (Taiwanese Mandarin, Korean, Thai, Japanese). Acting together becomes an intensified version of the Meisner technique, requiring attention to cues beyond words—pacing, expressions, tone. Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), the director, insists on repeated, robotic readings of the text in which the dialogue is rote-memorized but the accompanying emotions are not. It’s a method modeled on that of Robert Bresson, another Hamaguchi icon. The idea is that, at some point, the text of the play and the inner life of the actor will coincide in a genuine reaction and moment of grace. (Hamaguchi describing a particular moment of Florence Delay’s performance in Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc: “What we witness and hear is the very vibration of a being that is shaken from an encounter of certain words with a certain body, and this is, again, a coincidence that is a mark of singularity within this time and space.”)

Hypotheticals, those vectors of possibility, recur in Drive My Car. Kafuku reveals at one point that he always knew about his wife’s infidelities; there was something mysterious about her he could never figure out. When she asked for a conversation after work, he drove around for hours to avoid returning home—only to ultimately find her collapsed on the floor following a brain hemorrhage. “If I had come a few minutes earlier, would she still be alive?” he asks Misaki (Tōko Miura), the young woman assigned to drive him around Hiroshima. She confesses that when she escaped a landslide that destroyed her house, she didn’t try to rescue her abusive mother. Another “if” hangs in the air: Could her mother have survived if Misaki had tried? Later she reveals that her mother would sometimes be kind to her in the guise of “Sachi,” a different, childish personality who may have been a schizophrenic delusion or a cunning pretense. Who died in the landslide? Sachi or her mother?

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is nothing but hypotheticals. In one of the anthology’s three stories, a woman mistakes a stranger for an ex-girlfriend, the “one who got away,” from her youth. Her new friend invites her to pretend: What if she was the old lover, what then would our protagonist say to her? In another tale, a spelling error and a time-jumping cut leave us wondering about the possible outcomes of a wonderfully unpredictable and erotic encounter between a college professor and his married student. But it’s the film’s first episode that really indulges in what-ifs. An awkward encounter between a young model, her best friend, and her former boyfriend unfolds with dramatic consequences; then everything resets and restarts, and what unfolds is an entirely different version of events with different consequences.

The point is not for us to figure out which is the “true” or real version, but to consider how each moment of our lives is extraordinarily contingent, containing many lives and universes. At the end of Drive My Car, Misaki wonders: What if there are no mysteries? Perhaps the questions that preoccupy both her and Kafuku are not solvable riddles but simply coexisting facts. Kafuku’s wife both loved him and sought other men. Misaki’s mother was both cruel and, occasionally, whether dissembling or not, kind. That many of these conversations happen in a car, as do important exchanges in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, is meaningful. To be in a car is to be in a liminal, coincidental state: both inside and outside, mobile and still.

Much of Evil Does Not Exist, the most mysterious of Hamaguchi’s films, also takes place in a car. The film began with Japanese singer-songwriter Eiko Ishibashi, who composed the music for Drive My Car, inviting Hamaguchi to capture some footage of her rural, mountainous hometown for use in her live concerts. That turned into GIFT (2023), a silent film intended to be accompanied by Ishibashi performing live, and Evil Does Not Exist, a feature film with a score by Ishibashi. The feature centers on a village selected by a corporation as the site for a new glamping retreat. The villagers, particularly the taciturn caretaker, are concerned about the development’s potential effects on the land and water and the incursion of city dwellers in their communal idyll.

Evil Does Not Exist is not a film of coincidences. Rather, it is one of inexplicable divergences and shifting perspectives. Several times, a sudden movement or change in angle reveals what initially seems like a standard wide shot turns out to be the point of view of a nonhuman entity—a wild wasabi plant, a deer carcass, or the back of a car. Ishibashi’s bursts of sinister music underline the uncanniness of it all. The film’s end involves a particularly intriguing perspectival flip. Framed in a static wide shot, a character walks away from the camera and toward a distant figure. There’s a cutaway, and then the same shot returns, with the character still walking away from the camera. Or so we think: an unexpected intrusion into the frame reveals that the camera has actually moved 180 degrees.

Coincidences are all about one’s vantage point. They would go unnoticed if not for a very particular point of view grounded in a loving attentiveness to the world. As Hamaguchi says of the synergistic scenes in Ozu: “The reason why these moments have such power is because coincidences are like crystals. Peer into them, and they will show you the many possibilities in which that coincidence did not exist.” Hamaguchi’s films attune us to the sheer contingency of what we see—to the ways in which the slightest shifts can produce entirely different results—so that each scene feels like lightning caught in a bottle. It is a skillful reconstruction of a precise perspective that allows umpteen little details to cohere into a specific affect, something greater than the sum of its parts. Some might call it chance; others, fate or God. Hamaguchi would call it pure cinema.

Devika Girish is the co-editor of Film Comment and a Talks programmer for the New York Film Festival. Her work also appears in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Sight & Sound, The Nation, The Criterion Collection, and other publications