Asako I & II starts with a benign stalking. A young woman is standing in front of a black and white Shigeo Gocho photograph of twin girls—one and two—when a stranger sidles up behind to get a look. He moves on after a second but she’s transfixed by him. When he leaves the exhibition, she follows, up the escalator, out of the building, into the street. Woozy synths start playing as they look at each other, separated by maybe a dozen feet and a group of children bursting firecrackers. He walks up to her, they introduce themselves and suddenly he kisses her. It’s an intensely romantic scene, though with an edge, almost Brian De Palma-like.
“And that’s how we met,” Baku (Masahiro Higashide) tells his friend, as the
film takes the first of several nonchalant time jumps. Asako is his girlfriend
now, as smitten as when she first met him. Her friend, Haruyo (Sairi Ito),
warns her that he’s probably bad news. We see a glimmer of this when Baku goes
out to buy bread one evening and doesn’t return till morning. Asako makes him
promise he won’t do it again. Even as they embrace, the voiceover says: “Six
months later, Baku said he was going to buy shoes and never came back.”
Two years later, Asako is in Tokyo, having left Osaka, though not the memory
of Baku, behind. She works at a coffee shop, which regularly delivers to a sake
company’s office nearby. There she runs into a man who’s the spitting image of
her old lover, though in a suit and without the long hair. She tentatively
says, “Baku?” But his name is Ryohei.
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s reputation on the world scene has been growing for a
while, starting with Happy Hour, which played at the Locarno Film
Festival in 2015, followed by Asako I & II, which was in
competition at Cannes in 2018. This has been a breakthrough year: His Wheel
Of Fortune And Fantasy won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin, and Drive
My Car won three prizes, including best screenplay, at Cannes. I have not
watched Happy Hour but the three that came after reflect a specific and
unique sensibility: orderly, understated, curious about the workings of love
and desire.
One should say the failings—for romantic attraction and fulfilment rarely
follow each other as a matter of course in his films. For instance, Ryohei
falls, immediately and inconveniently, in love with Asako. She doesn’t tell him
about Baku, and, after rejecting his advances for some time, enters into a
romantic relationship with him. It’s a less twisted Vertigo—a missing,
possibly dead, partner replaced by a doppelganger. But Hamaguchi is less
concerned with the perversity of the situation than with the emotional
implications, especially when Asako is forced to reckon, in the film’s dramatic
final stretch, with what Ryohei means. Is he his own man or Baku II?
Though the tonalities are different, Hamaguchi’s work has more than a touch
of Éric Rohmer. A critic-turned-director, Rohmer made outwardly simple,
emotionally intricate films like My Night At Maud’s, Love In The Afternoon
and Claire’s Knee. Most of these were simultaneously understated and
talky, about desires that shouldn’t arise but invariably do. Like the French
director, Hamaguchi has an unfussy but striking visual sense—there’s a precise
richness to his framing that’s very soothing.
Both of Hamaguchi’s films from this year improve on aspects of Asako I
& II. Erika Karata is appealing but blank as Asako; another actor
might have telegraphed more clearly what she feels about her two lovers, and
why the title refers to two Asakos when there seems to be only a consistently
opaque one. But in Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy—a triptych of stories, the
first two about romantic entanglements, the last (and best) about chance
encounters and generosity—the women playing the leads are less manicured, and
uniformly excellent. Drive My Car, though working through themes present
in Hamaguchi’s earlier work, feels like a turning point. An adaptation of a
Haruki Murakami short story about a theatre director who throws himself into a
production of Uncle Vanya not long after the death of his wife, it’s a
sombre and deeply felt examination of loss and recovery.
Asako I & II, streaming on MUBI, is a worthy introduction to
Hamaguchi while we wait for his other work to appear on OTT here (or, if we
should be so lucky, in a theatre). My favourite scene from all his films comes
towards the end of this one. Asako, in a long shot, runs after Ryohei along a
winding country road. The rain, which had been pouring a few seconds earlier,
stops, and as she runs, a wall of sunshine extends behind her. It’s a
miraculous natural moment captured on film, like the gust of wind blowing
across the field in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. As a symbol of hard-won
joy, it’s more exhilarating than anything Hamaguchi’s characters could have
explained in words.
This piece is published in Mint Lounge.
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