Ryusuke Hamaguchi on letting real life frame ‘Evil Does Not Exist’
For the distinguished director ryusuke hamaguchi, film is a simple art form. There’s the time and space that’s framed by the camera, and then there’s everything else.
hamaguchi, known for his highly praised 2021 feature “drive my car,” the first Japanese movie to earn a best picture Academy Award nomination, approaches every shot as if it were an element of documentary. his latest feature film, “Evil does not Exist,” fictionalizes a real-life debate between a rural Japanese community and a team of developers who want to build a tourist resort upstream. hamaguchi says he began by filming the natural environment of his setting, then wrote the script to fit.
“i had already collected a lot of visual motifs that i could use within the film, and i started looking for what kind of story i could create out of those,” he explained through a translator. “That was when i heard about this glamping incident.”
As he portrays it in the film, a company eager to cash in on expiring government subsidies submits a proposal to build an upscale “glamping” campsite, with ample amenities to attract well-off city dwellers. in a town of 6,000, concerned members of the community attend a town hall-style meeting with two representatives of the project. in their haste, the developers have underestimated the site’s wastewater management.
The townspeople, deeply connected to their forested surroundings, demand that the intruders revise their plans. They answer to a village elder, but the true heart and soul of the community is a man of few words, a widower raising his adventurous young daughter. Taku
‘Perhaps there isn’t any such thing as slow cinema. All we have is a rich sense of time that is spreading out and happening in front of our eyes.’ RYUSUKE HAMAGUCHI (right)
mi calls himself an “odd-job man.” he chops wood and collects fresh stream water for the proprietor of a beloved noodle shop.
Yoshio kitagawa’s cinematography frames the story in the impenetrable facial expression of hitoshi Omika, the first-time actor who plays Takumi. hamaguchi says Omika was working behind the scenes, on the production crew, when the director asked him to stand in for the main character he was formulating in his mind.
soon, he said, “i realized his expressionless face does let people wonder what he might be thinking. i started to think of the story of the film with his face in it. i think it ended up being this wonderful choice, because the mysteriousness of his face really helps with the last action he makes in the film.”
Beginning with its enigmatic title, the film leaves behind plenty of residual emotions to reckon with. in this pristine mountainside environment, occasional gunshots ring out across the landscape. At one point, one of the pr reps for the company, a creature of urbanity, asks whether deer are dangerous to humans. Takumi replies that they are not, unless they have been wounded.
hamaguchi has established himself as a director of uncommon precision. The pulitzer prize-winning critic Justin chang recently wrote that “drive my car” (which won the Academy Award for best international feature film) is “the rare Oscar-winning weepie that can be hailed, without hesitation or error, as a masterpiece.”
With “Evil,” hamaguchi and his camera crew let the story unfold at a languid pace. The film opens with a long, almost hallucinatory skyward shot of tall tree branches swaying in a breeze. careful scenes of Takumi chopping wood and scooping water attest to his holistic relationship with the land.
The film, which was awarded the grand Jury prize at the Venice international Film Festival last August, shares a quiet sensibility with other acclaimed recent releases such as “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of interest.”
Yet hamaguchi believes that lingering scenes don’t imply an absence of action. Anything but.
“To be quite frank, i don’t think i quite understand what people mean when they say ‘slow cinema,’” he said. “in the three minutes when we see the tree shots, people might think there’s nothing happening. But if you just look at the relationships of the branches, the way that they’re layered, i think there’s enough on the screen to say there’s a lot happening in those moments.
“perhaps there isn’t any such thing as slow cinema,” he added. “All we have is a rich sense of time that is spreading out and happening in front of our eyes.”
hamaguchi understands that many viewers will find easy symbolism in his simple tale of an ecosystem in peril. The rich developers want to build upstream; the humble townsfolk sit downstream.
“i’m just quoting a local in that moment,” he explained. “i think some people might interpret that as representing the hierarchy that exists in society, but to me it’s more about the relationship between these elements — a cause-andeffect relationship.”
By this point in his career, it’s clear that hamaguchi is comfortable with unsettled questions. Early audiences have been debating the meaning of the conclusion of his latest film, in which all those ruminations come to a head.
he’s never given much thought to his own comfort level with a lack of resolution in real life, he said. After considering the question, he offered an analogy.
“in my childhood [in Japan], we would move around a lot because of my parents’ work,” he said. “i would say goodbye to friends at a school, thinking i’d never see them again.”
Years later, he was surprised to hear from some of those old friends again, online.
“so what i thought was done was in fact not done,” he said. “i think that’s just how life is.”