TThe winter sky in the opening shot of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist” is a brilliant white, visible through a tangle of thin tree branches. Against the backdrop of glorious orchestral music, the scene looks sublime. But then I hear a dissonance in the music. And one more thing. Not everything is as it seems.
“I started from a place where I knew nothing,” Hamaguchi says of his new work, which establishes and then shakes up the image of paradise nature. He speaks with incredible humility about his status as one of Japan’s most prominent writers. It was late 2021, he recalls. his previous movie, please drive in my car” had been released (and quickly became a surprise awards season hit, winning the Oscar for Best International Feature Film). Musician Eiko Ishibashi, who composed the music for “Drive My Car,” asked the director if he could provide background visuals for her tour. Hamaguchi, who has lived in the city for many years, visited her studio in the countryside. As she listened to her music against the backdrop of vast landscapes, inspiration struck.
Hamaguchi returned from that trip with the germ of an idea for “Evil Does Not Exist,” similar to the silent work “Gift,” which will be performed at Ishibashi’s performances. Director Hamaguchi, speaking via video from Yokohama with an interpreter, said the film was almost an accident and that he did not “set out to make it.” The title “naturally came to his mind while looking at nature,” he says. At that time, he felt that although “violence exists in nature” such as natural disasters, “that violence does not necessarily make us think, ‘Oh, that’s evil.'” Perhaps evil exists, he said. ” So he began writing a script about the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
The story he ultimately created is strikingly contemporary, touching on evergreen concerns such as gentrification, conservation, and the effects of a culture that values profit above all else. From Tokyo, he and two young workers arrived in a village several hours away to host a public meeting about plans to establish a new glamping site for tourists from the city. They have some clever marketing material and a lot of self-confidence and a sense that it might be okay to have some raw sewage mixed in with the village water supply. The residents did not agree to this, leading to a slow-burning conflict between the city and the countryside.
Drive My Car, an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story about an actor grieving his wife, was hailed as a masterpiece and catapulted the director to a new level of international success. The film received four Oscar nominations, becoming the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture in addition to winning the International Film Award. However, new concerns have also arisen. “I didn’t know what to do next,” Hamaguchi recalls. Making this new film “was a way for me to release pressure.”
Perhaps those fears were unfounded. There Is No Evil won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Picture Award at the London Film Festival. Unlike Drive My Car, this film is relatively short (106 minutes compared to Drive My Car’s three hours) and moves toward an ending that is surprisingly ambiguous given the film’s political themes. As the story unfolds, it has a more mysterious atmosphere.
“I’m often asked about the message of this movie,” director Hamaguchi said, declining to say explicitly. “Some people say this is the most political movie I’ve ever made, but I wasn’t really thinking about that when I was making it.” Instead, the politics were handled in a separate register. “Words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘environment’ seem like big issues, but they are part of our everyday behavior. I approach these topics not as big ideas looming over us. Rather, I believe that we should approach it as a problem in our daily lives.” Regarding the mysterious ending, “No one can understand everything. There are things in our world that we cannot understand.” I think one of the goals of a movie is to distill the world in a way, so if there’s no mystery in the story, I don’t think it’s reflective of the world.”
The idea of mystery is a mainstay of Hamaguchi’s films, which tell quietly observational stories about hidden intimacies built between lovers, friends, and strangers. In 2015, he garnered worldwide attention with his highly acclaimed five-hour blockbuster “Happy Hour,” about a middle-aged woman overcoming an unhappy marriage. 2018’s romantic drama Asako I & II was about the aftermath of a breakup between young lovers, while 2021’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was released around the same time as Drive My Car. It’s an anthology of three stories that loosely depict love that has been published and lost. To outsiders, these appear to be signs of a breakout career, with his early hits followed by a string of well-received arthouse films before record-breaking global success. maybe. But Hamaguchi had been working in the industry for years before that.
Due to his father’s job as a civil servant, he spent his childhood moving around Japan every few years, and loved “manga and games that you could enjoy no matter where you were.” I didn’t have a particularly artistic childhood. It wasn’t necessarily terrible, but it also didn’t seem very fun. ” Things started to get more interesting at university in Tokyo, where he joined a film club and started going to screenings around the city.
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Success didn’t come quickly. When he graduated from college, a professor put him in touch with an alumnus who was a director in the Japanese commercial film industry. (Compared to the independent world, they produce films with larger budgets and staff) Hamaguchi then got a job as a junior assistant director. “Back then, the industry was still working in the old way. There was a sense of, ‘If I’m bad at my job, I’ll be punished for being bad at my job,’ and ‘I was probably a bad worker to my boss.'” . Knowing that the commercial world was not for him, he went to graduate school and studied under famous director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, before venturing into independent documentary production.
A longtime movie buff, Hamaguchi professes an admiration for classic Hollywood. Douglas Sirk’s All Heaven Allows and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant’s Romantic Comedy Holiday Count in his favorite movie. Did Drive My Car’s success in the US make you interested in working in that world? “I think Hollywood today is very different from classic Hollywood,” he says. “I feel like I don’t really understand how Hollywood works today.” He’s personally curious about what the sets of big-budget movies are like. But “ultimately it has to be the right opportunity.”
Even more quickly, he seemed to find the freedom he was looking for after releasing Drive My Car. “When he didn’t know what he wanted to do, it was important for him to go back to basics,” he says. The new film raises many questions, but he is characteristically keen to maintain the importance of the unknown to himself and his viewers. “This film reflects the limits of my own understanding and thinking,” he says, repeating something he said earlier in a conversation about the importance of mystery. “I believe the world is full of mysteries and absurdities. We may not always find the answers in our lifetime, but we certainly feel what we feel as we live in this world.”
“Evil Does Not Exist” has ended April 5th.
