It’s rewarding to travel back through the filmographies of directors to grasp the roots of their oeuvre. Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, with his Asako I & II (2018), Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) and Drive My Car (2021), has piqued the interest of cinephiles beyond his home ground and gained a committed following across the world to have his graduation feature film Passion (2008) get an official release in the USA for the first time this weekend. Openings in more markets are expected to follow.
Passion is where one can discern the earliest documentation of the kind of individuals, relationships and human conditions that Hamaguchi has steadily and intently engaged with at large. It also helps a viewer understand the coinciding worlds that he has been constructing, film after film. As a student thesis project at the Tokyo University of the Arts, the film was played at the San Sebastian Film Festival and Tokyo FILMeX.
In Passion, Hamaguchi makes us dive headlong into the lives of a set of friends in their late 20s and early 30s (an age group he has been particularly interested in). They still carry remnants of adolescence in themselves and are in the process of maturing and growing. They have gathered for dinner to celebrate the birthday of Kaho (Aoba Kawai). It’s also a special occasion for Tomoya (Ryuta Okamoto), who is in a relationship with Kaho, and they are about to announce their engagement, even as another couple in the friends is expecting their first child. But things are not as settled and resolved as they might seem on the surface. What follows the dinner is a disruptive ride through chaotic emotions and muddled desires.
Hamaguchi builds the narrative on never-ending conversations and confessions—in the restaurant and later in the apartments and homes—through which the characters reveal their whimsicalities, fickleness and frailties, vulnerabilities and insecurities, confusions about the ties that bind, the underlying deceptions, infidelities and the resultant guilt, the essential loneliness amid company, the angst and alienation and an inexplicable urge and search for the unfathomable.
Their inner quest is framed in telling close-ups of long set-pieces, indoors that get juxtaposed against the brief glimpses of monotonous outdoor landscapes, indistinguishable buildings and indistinct streets.
There’s forbidden desire, unrequited passion for someone you are not with and a tendency to take the one with you for granted. Illicit affairs, dangerous liaisons and intersecting triangles come tumbling out of the closets in the matter of an evening, night, and morning after. There are indirect expressions of impulsive yearnings and thwarted longings—“I’d have studied more if I had a teacher as pretty as you”, “Marry me when you leave him”, “I wish I could have chosen you”. These might feel like casual banter but are candid confessions, that get more revealing as the discussions get focused on free will and choice, being reckless, like a free bird.
Hamaguchi puts complicated, convoluted modern relationships under his characteristic, piercing cinematic microscope. Do we know how to love? What does it mean to be in love? He probes the ideas of sincerity, truth, and trust in marriage. Do people marry because they truly want to be with each other? These questions might seem rhetorical, but Hamaguchi is never judgmental.
There is nothing black or white in his gaze. The transgressors have enough in them to redeem themselves. The seemingly innocent are tainted in their own disguised way. The relationships might appear baffling, inscrutable, and even downright absurd but are intriguing and affecting, nonetheless.
Passion ultimately is like an enquiry that brings a specific movement in relationships to a conclusion at a given juncture, but hints at things still being in a circular formation—being, becoming, unravelling, and collapsing to start all over again. A film on the flux of life without a defined sense of an ending.