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Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the director behind the superb 'Drive My Car'

2022-02-04T03:44:26.699Z


The Japanese filmmaker is the most heard foreign name in the awards season that ends at the Oscars Where does the Japanese Ryûsuke Hamaguchi come from? How can it be that in the last editions of the Berlin and Cannes festivals the best films screened, The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car, were the work of the same filmmaker? On very few occasions has a creator arrived with so many different films – Francis Ford Coppola is in my memory in 1974 with The Godfather II and The Conversat


Where does the Japanese Ryûsuke Hamaguchi come from?

How can it be that in the last editions of the Berlin and Cannes festivals the best films screened,

The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

and

Drive My Car,

were the work of the same filmmaker?

On very few occasions has a creator arrived with so many different films – Francis Ford Coppola is in my memory in 1974 with

The Godfather II

and

The Conversation

– in the same season.

This director of chance and destiny, a lover of the unexpected, coincidence games and strange symmetries, is an affable person and more talkative than usual among Japanese directors.

His foreign name is the most heard in awards season.

More information

'Drive My Car': one of the most extraordinary movies of the season

Few filmmakers have benefited from the pandemic.

Between confinements and filming slowed down by anticovid protocols, filming has become a cumbersome experience.

However, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Kanagawa, 43 years old) those breaks have served to become the auteur film director of the season.

First, because his

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

ended up at the 2021 Berlinale, where he won the Grand Jury Prize, after waiting for a slot for its release the previous year.

And later, because

Drive My Car

—It opens today in Spain—, which he shot avoiding confinement, was the great cinematographic event of Cannes

(Titane,

the winner of the Palme d'Or, is something else), although it only won the awards for best screenplay and international critics, and its cover letter in the United States.

It's clear: the festival circuit adores him.

If anything, one question may stand in his way to the Oscars: whether academics will watch a three-hour movie with subtitles.

They should, because they are missing out on a gem.

Next Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations are announced,

Drive My Car

is not only the favorite to lead the finalists for best international film, but it could also catapult Hamaguchi into the category of best direction.

Now, will she also be among the 10 candidates for the big prize, the best film?

02:00

Trailer for 'The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy'

Image from 'The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy'.

Hamaguchi is an old acquaintance in the auteur film scene.

He has been climbing positions, since he started, after finishing university, directing advertising.

He did it for several years, until he enrolled in a film program at the Tokyo University of the Arts.

There he saw some titles that have become the great referents of his style, such as

Husbands,

by John Cassavetes, from whom he has taken his method of working with actors;

Alphaville,

by Jean-Luc Godard;

or a documentary about Jean Renoir and his work with the performers, which served as a guide for the filming of

Happy Hours.

His graduation film,

Passion

(2008), competed in the New Directors section of the San Sebastián festival, and from then on he has been combining fiction feature films with documentaries.

In 2015

Happy Hours,

born from an improvisation workshop with non-professional performers, participated in the Locarno (Switzerland) competition, and put Hamaguchi on the international map.

That story of four women in their thirties told in five hours was concocted with improvisation and a commitment to mysteries and the unexpected in human relationships.

These are the essential elements of Hamaguchi's cinema, which came together in

Asako I and II

(2018)

,

the strange adventure starring a woman who finds a boy exactly like her boyfriend who disappeared two years earlier.

“Chance is the world.

We would not exist without him”, he told EL PAÍS during the last San Sebastián festival about his taste for coincidences and the influence they exert on sentimental relationships.

This is what The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

(2021), the Berlinale Grand Jury Prize,

revolves around, three stories with leading women who, through an unexpected love, a failed seduction and a strange encounter born of a misunderstanding, make up a

portrait of the

fatum

as the engine of life.

Commission: adapt Murakami

The wheel of fortune and fantasy

rolled it his way, with a technical team made up of eight people, including himself.

Another thing has been

Drive My Car,

the version of him from the world of writer Haruki Murakami, a big-budget commission.

“Actually, Murakami's novels can't be adapted into movies.

It is impossible.

As you consider a literal adaptation, you fail.

The proposal came from the producer, and he told me about another novel.

I felt incapable, and instead I pointed out that in

Drive My Car

I did see material that I felt close to, and that I knew how to capture his spirit in a film”, he told EL PAÍS.

The story, of no more than 40 pages, is in the compilation book

Men and women

, from which Hamaguchi has taken more material, because two other stories, Scheherazade

and

Kino

, also appear in different ways .

"I like how Wim Wenders and Aki Kaurismäki roll inside cars, I'm attracted to how they reflect the life that goes on beyond the vehicle windows", he assured during the promotion in London.

The protagonist, a theater director, owns a Saab (in the novel it is yellow; the filmmaker preferred it to be red so that it would stand out on screen) with which he moves everywhere, becoming a virtual rehearsal office.

One day he discovers his wife having sex with a young actor in his apartment, and decides to keep it a secret.

The plot turns, twists and ends up taking the playwright to the other side of Japan, to direct an adaptation of

Uncle Vanya,

of Chekhov, with actors of different nationalities who will each use their mother tongue for the performance, since the director of the play builds a very special bond with the driver who transports him: “I am the same filmmaker, and although they are very different formally , in both you can see my effort to create an art form.

I also think that cinema, as an art, has always been in the minority [in Japan, Hamaguchi has organized an economic fund to help auteur cinemas].

I am not afraid of its future, because it will not disappear, although, make no mistake, it will not grow.

Hidetoshi Nishijima, standing, and Tôko Miura, behind the wheel, in 'Drive My Car', by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Drive My Car

's drive

to talk about the traces that the dead leave on the living, on the echoes that resonate housed in the souls of the survivors, stems from Hamaguchi's reflections on truth and lies, accentuated by theatre, Greek masks that hide the faces of the actors.

“Acting reveals the truth;

if you lie, you hide behind a mask ”, he pointed out at the New York festival.

“Now then, you can also tell the truth under a mask, and that's the art, isn't it?

What you show on the surface and what you express below may not coincide.

In the end, as a filmmaker, what I want is truth in my actors.

It's almost a matter of faith."

Due to the accolades race to the Oscars, in which

Drive My Car

has already won the Golden Globe from the vilified Hollywood foreign press association and various congratulations from different critics' organizations, Hamaguchi has slowed down pre-production on his next film,

Our Apprenticeship.

The Japanese do not care much about the awards, although the South Korean Bong Joon-ho said the same in the year of

Parasites,

until he saw himself with the statuette in his hand and could only show his surprised and happy face.

Hamaguchi's gesture will have to be seen on March 27 if he wins an Oscar.

Source: elparis

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