Hamaguchi sublimates the moral ambiguity of desire

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED

New standard of Far Eastern auteur cinema, the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi made a dazzling international breakthrough, which led him, after the revelation of Senses in 2015, directly in the holy of holies of the Cannes competition with Asako I & II (2018) then Drive My Car (2021), title which has just received the Oscar for best foreign film. As for the universe of Hamaguchi, a certain formal austerity, associated with a taste for the device, stands side by side with a sentimental casuistry as subtle as it is twisted. It would evoke that of an Eric Rohmer to cite the closest reference, but no less that of the great Japanese classic Mikio Naruse, whose melancholy and cruel delicacy he shares, or his Korean contemporary Hong Sang-soo, from whom he probably takes his taste for specular narrative structures (stories that start from scratch, split characters, discreet fantasy, etc.)

Tales of chance & other fantasiesproduced during the Covid-19 break from the filming of Drive My Carselected at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, is only being released today in France and confirms, more than any other of his films, the director’s affinity with the author of the moral tales. How to do justice to these short stories, more particularly to their narrative mastery and their moral ambiguity, without revealing a bit of their plot and the very tasty way in which they are shot?

Nice surprises in store

Three chaptered stories are therefore proposed to us, in which the point of view, the dramatic initiative and the presence of women are preeminent. The first, titled Magic?, brings two young women back from a night taxi photo shoot in the streets of Tokyo. Between infantile candor, discipline of carnal load and mental ecstasy, Gumi, the make-up artist, confides in Meiko, the model, about the crush she is experiencing with a stranger who captivates her all the more because he is still in the grip of a heartache. Meiko drops off her friend, then goes straight to the young man, who is obviously the one she has just dropped. The surprise here stale reserves some others, even more beautiful, behind.

Katsuki Mori and Kiyohiko Shibukawa

The second story is called Open door. The title is due to the habit of Professor Segawa, a specialist in French literature and novelist, of always keeping, out of elementary caution with regard to the evolution of social networks, the door of his office open at the university. But here is precisely that a former student, a vulgar moron dismissed from the university by her care, is plotting a sexual ambush to take revenge. He sends to seduce him his own mistress, Nao, a married woman who is bored at home and who is precisely a former student of Professor Segawa. Under the pretext of having her latest novel autographed, the recorder of her cell phone engaged in her pocket, the young woman, with incredible charm, comes to read to the professor one of the most sexually torrid passages of the book because she would like that he dedicates it to her precisely at this place…

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