Passion

A Japanese film about a group of friends in their late twenties. Kaho and Tomoya announce their engagement at dinner. The others congratulate them, and the evening does not recover. There are five or six of them and they have known each other since university. Everyone has slept with or wanted somebody at the table, and nobody has ever said so. From there the film is conversation. A flat, a bar, a classroom, a car, and scenes that run far past the point where a normal film would cut. One of the group teaches at a school. A long sequence there, with the class discussing violence, sits in the middle of the film and pays off much later. Nothing is resolved by talking. Each conversation makes things slightly worse, and people keep talking anyway. What the narrative is interested in is not infidelity but articulacy: everyone can explain themselves at length and none of them can stop what they are doing, and the film treats that gap as the actual subject. There is one act of violence and it is filmed plainly, without music, and it changes the register of everything after it. The style is the point of interest for anyone following the director's later work. Static camera, long takes, actors talking across each other, and an interest in what happens to a scene when it is not cut. Aoba Kawai, Ryuta Okamoto and Kiyohiko Shibukawa are in the cast. Ryusuke Hamaguchi directed. It was made as his graduation film at art school and circulated very little at the time; it was distributed more widely years afterwards, once his later films had found an audience. Who it is for: anyone following the director from his later work who wants to see the method already formed. Who it is not for: anyone impatient; it is over two hours of people talking and the sound and image are student-film rough.