I Love Thee For Good and Like Nothing Happened

Archaic and awkward in its phrasing, the English title of Eien ni kimi wo aisu (I Love Thee For Good, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, 2009) refers to a wedding, and the wedding at the film’s centre is suitably archaic and awkward. Archaic in that it enacts a series of rigid protocols that structures the behaviour of the protagonists. Awkward because that behaviour – fuelled by individual and often irrational desires at variance with what is expected – threatens to overspill the boundaries of decorum.

Like Hitchcock, Ozu, Ophuls, Demy, Akerman (all cited here), and countless others before him, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke uses the dialectic between social and individual desire to structure I Love Thee For Good. He crystallises the protagonists’ dilemmas in three remarkable sequences that centre on unbroken three-minute takes. In the first two, the groom and bride are separate, confronted with their pasts. In the third, the couple come together to decide their future.

The opening scene is a tour-de-force of filmmaking – in effect a sequence shot that not only sets up the narrative but lays out the building blocks of the film’s formal and thematic architecture. It begins with a breeze blowing through the curtains of an apartment window – the first of many contrasts in the film between nature and the ‘manmade’, and between movement and stasis, while also demonstrating the visible effects of forces we cannot see.

The camera pans to a woman sitting at a table. She addresses an unseen companion, and eventually moves from her seat near the back of the room to the foreground where the future groom Seiichi (Sugiyama Hikohiko) lies, bleary from a night of heavy pre-marriage drinking, and taking refuge with an ex. The camera in this sequence sticks with the two characters, but we are given no access to their inner thoughts – compare with the scene introducing the bride Eiko (Kawai Aoba), whose anxieties are articulated in both voiceover and the letter she is trying to write admitting to an infidelity, and perhaps also in the emotive Jeff Buckley-style acoustic music that bleeds in from the previous scene. Eiko’s thoughtful subjectivity contrasts with Seiichi’s apparent vacuity – at first, he seems to be the schlub everyone, including his disenchanted mother assumes he is. It is only on a second viewing that we understand the injustice that has been done to Seiichi – in the film and perhaps all his life. He is thinking in this opening sequence – thinking hard. He is conflicted, trying to work out what to do with the knowledge he has and that the audience and other characters condescendingly assume he does not have.  

Hamaguchi’s approach in this opening sequence and throughout the film is informed by Éric Rohmer, the great French chronicler of young people in love. Rohmer, who made several films for schools, was essentially a didactic artist, providing his viewers with the cognitive tools to learn alongside his characters. He would set up narrative situations that were misleading, partial, or otherwise liable to being misread, resulting in flawed value judgements. His characters learning to properly understand the scenario they are in parallels the viewer’s growing ability to ‘read’ the narrative information. Almost everything we see in the first sequence of I Love Thee For Good will need to be revised on a second viewing.

The sequence also initiates what might be called the ‘grid’ or mathematical formal structure Hamaguchi creates as a correlative to the rigid, pre-determined world that the alleged free agents must navigate. For instance, the freedom of the camera as it follows the woman in her interactions with Seiichi, reframing and refocusing to capture their changing and transient dynamics, is limited by the claustrophobic space with its dull brown, grey and cream colour scheme that will be a feature of much of the décor across the film. A numerical sequence is wittily set up that seems to proliferate characters, like a cinematic Fibonacci sequence. I Love Thee For Good begins with one character, who becomes part of a temporary couple when she moves across to Seiichi; a third is implied when the telephone rings; while in the next scene, four musicians rehearse. This group would function as a Greek chorus if its members were not too self-absorbed for the traditional choric role of intervention and commentary, but it does make the film a Hamaguchi musical.  

This sort of proliferation – one, then two, then three, then four – is a characteristic of dreams. Another such characteristic is the fear of being found naked in a room full of strangers – and sure enough we are soon introduced to a nude model in a crowded life drawing class. Hisashi (Okabe Nao) is an emotionally vulnerable man unsettled by the attention of teenager Erina (Kanno Rio); she will transgress this safe space with its timetables and physical borders by confronting and teasing Hisashi in his makeshift dressing room, then following him when he leaves. Hisashi is the ex-boyfriend with whom Eiko had the fling before her wedding, and whose insecurities over how her upper-middle-class family would take his impermanent lifestyle prompted their initial breakup.  

Their confrontation at the hotel where the (Catholic) wedding ceremony is about to take place is the film’s second major set-piece. This scene emphasises a core element of Hamaguchi’s cinema – theatricality. The shot is blocked like a scene from a play, the protagonists moving from foreground to background and back again, declaiming their speeches in compositions that exaggerate their relation or distance from one another, as one character stands silent in the foreground, while the other paces to and fro behind.  

The film’s narrative is structured like a play. Like an 18th century French comedy of ideas by the likes of Marivaux, wherein characters introduced in isolation before meeting in a single site where the games of love and chance are played out. Or like a French farce, where the pressure of characters with conflicting desires caught in a constricted space explodes in a frenzy of entrances and exits, disguise and discovery, chase and capture. The film’s single most glorious moment, inspired by Hamaguchi’s other French master, Jacques Rivette, sees the intensely earnest confrontation between Eiko and Hisashi, shot in an increasingly merciless single take, broken when Erina leaps from under a table to confront them. Erina’s puckish sincerity continually sees through the hypocrisies of the would-be adults around her.  

I Love Thee For Good emphasises theatre, performance, and spectatorship; at one point, as everything is on the brink of collapse, someone urges ‘The show must go on’. Eiko is already in her wedding dress when she meets Hisashi and was about to rehearse the ceremony with Seiichi and the priest. Waiting rooms, cafés, or bathrooms become dressing rooms, while one extraordinary scene, as Seiichi finally gets to the hotel and greets his bride and the waiting families, takes place in a room with a full-length mirror that divides the action into two, as the divided characters both watch and participate in their own drama. Characters switch between the roles of performer and spectator – even on the train, hitherto a space of silent, solitary contemplation for characters, is transformed into a theatre when Erina demands that Hisashi tell her his backstory. She moves from his side to the seat opposite, ready to become a spectator at a performance – albeit a spectator prone to interrupt and comment when she finds the performance unsatisfactory.

The use of costumes in the film is ironically schematic. The prospective in-laws, for example, are presented as embodiments of tradition and modernity. Eiko’s parents wear kimono and the suit of a Meiji-era official, an authorised get-up that masks a history of the domestic violence that threatens to erupt at the film’s catastrophe. Seiichi’s single mother wears a modern cocktail dress – which is negatively commented on by Eiko’s mother, and which signposts the moral flexibility she will demonstrate later.

The third unbroken take is central to the film’s climax as Eiko and Seiichi thrash out their situation and future. The theatricality of the situation is overt – the couple move from the larger group of family and friends to a room where they can be together, separated by a door that functions as the flats in a play or opera. Perhaps opera best describes the scene with its entangled close-ups, and long, overheated, aria-like soliloquys (it should be a duet, but neither appears to be attending to the other). The scene that precedes this one is genuinely shocking. Despite all the civility and playfulness that has characterised the film and its world, Eiko’s humiliating and archaic public confession of her infidelity leads to a violent and archaic abjuration by her family, in particular her father, who abases himself before the wronged groom, and the young brother, the most conservative character of the film, whose lips still curl in distaste when the wedding finally gets underway.  

This kind of family drama, as decreed by Hamaguchi’s sources, should end with a wedding, but it hardly produces a satisfying conclusion. Not all problems are acknowledged or resolved; the protagonists do not face the future with a blank slate. The married couple look grim rather than happy as they walk down the aisle to the Wedding March, and the closing shot on Eiko’s pregnant belly reminds us that there are plenty more dramas to come in these characters’ lives. No wonder Hamaguchi replaces the usual title ‘The End’ with ‘Not The End’.  

Even then, I Love Thee For Good is not quite over. The film’s other couple, Erina and Hisashi, leave the hotel to escape the suffocating compromises of the adult world, and – for now at least – opt for joy and play. As they run off together playing games, the camera settles on a classical putto blowing a horn on the fountain outside the hotel. As an emissary of Cupid/Eros, the putto is a reminder of the transgressive natural energies that ‘manmade’ systems can ever fully contain.

The romance of Eiko and Hisashi began when they were at university. It is tempting to see I Love Thee For Good as an unofficial sequel to Hamaguchi’s University of Tokyo student film Nani kuwanu kao (Like Nothing Happened, 2003), about college students hanging out, joking, and fiddling while emotional fires burn beneath. Compared to the slick technical polish and bougie locale of I Love Thee For Good, made for the wide audiences of Japanese television, Like Nothing Happened is a scrappy affair. Shot on 8mm, with the lighting often getting the better of the tyro crew, it was made in short bursts that don’t always add up (often looking like surveillance footage) and clumsily post-synced so that you are always aware of the disparity between the diegetic conversations taking place in crowded milieux, and the overdubbed voices, pristine and airless, recorded in a studio.

That said, Like Nothing Happened is remarkably ambitious for a student short, many of which understandably focus on anecdotes or slices of life. Hamaguchi here is already pushing towards the complexity of his features – the most widely available version of Like Nothing Happened runs at 43 minutes, but originally formed the Godard- and Antonioni-inflected ‘film-within-a-film’ part of a 98-minute version that still exists and is occasionally, reluctantly screened by Hamaguchi. Besides marshalling a multi-strand, multi-location narrative, and executing some impressive camera movements, Hamaguchi introduces many of the motifs and themes developed in I Love Thee For Good and later films – the shifting alliances within a group of friends; the structuring use of monorail journeys that existentially confront characters with their urban environments; the emphasis on social rituals and recreation spaces; the interplay between male and female, the individual and the group, light and dark, on- and off-screen, literature and cinema, being and doing, home and transient ‘in-between’ spaces, and physical and psychological violence; temporal ellipses, and long takes comprising ‘dead time’; and the importance of role-playing and story-telling.

An added bonus is Hamaguchi’s own performance as the clown of the group, easily the most memorable acting of the ensemble cast. His story revealing his participation in school bullying brings the characters to a crisis and the narrative into unexpected directions. Filmmaking’s gain may be acting’s loss, but hopefully we have not seen the last of Hamaguchi the performer while his directorial star continues to rise.  

Eien ni kimi wo aisu/I Love Thee For Good (2009 Japan 58 mins)
Dir: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke Scr: Watanabe Yūko Phot:  Aoki Yutaka Ed: Yamazaki Azusa Mus: Okamoto Hideyuki
Cast: Kawai Aoba, Sugiyama Hikohiko, Okabe Nao, Kanno Rio

Nani kuwanu kao/Like Nothing Happened (2003 Japan 98/43 mins)
Prod, Dir, Scr, Ed: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke
Cast: Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, Matsui Tomo, Okamoto Hideyuki, Endo Ikuko, Ishii Rie