The Japanese film industry has produced dozens of directors that, over the decades, have been hailed by Japanese critics as masters but never became well-known abroad. Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasuji…
by Korean star director Bong Joon-ho, on hand at the festival’s opening ceremony and again trod the red carpet, Friday evening, at the Asian Film Awards.
The 42-year-old Hamaguchi is hardly a newcomer: He made his debut with the 2008 “Passion,” his graduation film for his master’s degree at Tokyo University of the Arts. After that he co-directed a three-part documentary about the earthquake and tsunami that devasted northern Japan in March 2011. His fiction feature breakthrough, however, was the 2015 “Happy Hour,” a five-hour-plus ensemble drama that won best actress prizes for its four leads — all unknowns cast in workshops – at Locarno.
These two Hamaguchi films have won over not only foreign festival programmers and critics, who have given them rave reviews, but also buyers in markets not often friendly to Asian art films. One is Italy, where local distributor Tucker Film released “Wheel” in August and “Drive My Car” in September, starting in Rome.
Head of acquisitions Sabrina Baracetti, who is also the director of the Udine Far East Film Festival, where “Wheel” screened in late June, cites the Western-style “theatricality” of the film’s three-part structure , while comparing Hamaguchi’s “mastery of spoken cinema” to that of postwar Golden Age titans Ozu and Naruse. “But he also reminds me of Ingmar Bergman, with whom he shares a power of dialogue, in both words and silences,” she adds.
And if the other scheduled releases of “Wheel” and “Drive My Car” in Europe and the U.S. are any indication, Baracetti is not alone in her appreciation – and Hamaguchi is the new international face of today’s Japanese cinema.
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