FILMS

In art cinema circles, Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is the man of the moment, having premiered two superb films in 2021. , which reaches the UK next year, is a delicate, witty triptych of stories about emotion and confusion, with touches of Éric Rohmer. His three-hour feature is a deeper dive – and a narratively more slippery one – into the complexities of human feeling. Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, it starts off depicting the sex games between a Tokyo couple: he’s an actor and director, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), she’s a screenwriter, Oto (Reika Kirishima), who loves to tell ornate stories during sex. But after a while, we abruptly skip to the main body of the story, as a forlorn Yusuke heads to a theatre workshop in. He is assigned a young female driver, Misaki (Toko Miura), who’s more than somewhat taciturn; but that’s OK with Yusuke, who likes to learn his lines while travelling.