When a film clocks in at more than three hours, that’s usually because it’s taking on an outsized subject, like a world war, or drawing from a lengthy novel, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s 431-minute War and Peace. Less frequently, a long film burrows into an intimate story, like the love triangle at the heart of Jean Eustache’s 219-minute The Mother and the Whore. In Happy Hour, director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (working from a screenplay cowritten with Tadashi Nohara and Tomoyuki Takahashi) uses the 317-minute run time to focus on four Japanese friends at a crossroad in their lives.
Though the women of Happy Hour, which screens at Northwest Film Forum in two parts, haven’t quite hit middle age, the film has more in common with Jacques Rivette’s 773-minute Out 1 than HBO’s Sex and the City, as Hamaguchi prioritizes close observation over fast-moving plotlines. Each woman longs for more than surface-level stability and deeper connections with their partners and with each other. The better we get to know them, the more Hamaguchi justifies the film’s length as the women struggle against the patriarchy and politesse baked into Japanese society.