Like Nothing Happened / Passion
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Early Works. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
Like Nothing Happened (2003)
It’s understandable if, at the end of Like Nothing Happened, one finds oneself in agreement with the title. Four college students, old friends and new acquaintances, spend an afternoon at a racetrack and then go their separate ways. Loose and grainy, it looks and feels like a sketch but shot at a time when writer-director-actor Ryusuke Hamaguchi says he was interested in “how to arrange the gazes of characters,” there’s a lot working under the surface. Structured around the kind of conversational set pieces that would become hallmarks of Hamaguchi’s later films, including an extended Dadaist recitation of dictionary definitions on a train, Like Nothing Happened feels very much like where it all began.
Director/Screenwriter: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tomo Matsui, Hideyuki Okamoto.
Passion (2008)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's graduate thesis film at Tokyo University of the Arts, Passion prefigures the more complex and assured Happy Hour as a seemingly tight-knit group of friends and lovers falls apart as they navigate the transition to the next phases of their lives. Here, like Hamaguchi himself at the time, the carefully class-coded characters are younger, just entering careers, marriage and parenthood — or else grasping for ways to put them off. The capriciousness of desire emerges as a force and an excuse in a series of high-wire dialogue scenes as Hamaguchi explores the ethics of coupling and camerawork alike.
Director/Screenwriter: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With: Aoba Kawai, Ryuta Okamoto, Kiyohiko Shibukawa.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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