Critics reviews

Hamaguchi’s innovation here is to deliver melodramatic material with naturalistic, even understated performances and mise-en-scène, and this strategy has the effect of rendering both naturalism and melodrama uncanny.

Unlike Happy Hour, Asako is relatively trim, coming in at just under two hours while packing in a considerable amount both thematically and formally.

It’s breathtaking and appalling. But, the movie will leave you asking, is it actually appalling, or only appalling within the conventional wisdom of romantic drama? The provocation is apt to haunt you for some time after the lights go up.

The pleasures of Asako I & II, like those of Happy Hour, lie in witnessing the keen understanding evinced by Hamaguchi and his cast of how genuine emotions in romantic dyads are expressed or, just as often, concealed.

A smaller yet no less perceptive work that is similarly preoccupied with mining existential ruminations on identity, survival, and personal growth, this time through the cinematic dissection of an idiosyncratic love triangle.

Asako I & II, in the space of two incident-heavy hours, works in every bit as much feeling and active intelligence as its predecessor.

As is true of any festival, this one has some head-scratchers, including “Asako I & II,” a bland drama about a young woman, a cipher as droopy as the movie, whose heart breaks when her lover walks out.

Hamaguchi buries the miraculous under the banal, and vice versa, tracking his characters through cafés and conference rooms, cramped apartments and ordinary streets, with the wide-eyed sincerity of melodrama.

By far the most surprising and satisfying selection of this year’s Cannes Competition, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Asako I & II sets up and throws out stylistic paradigms faster than you can grab hold of them.

A sublimely crafted film, which glides between the quotidian and the thaumaturgic (the likeness between Baku and Ryohei is never explained), Asako I & II gives the viewer an elaborate portrait of middle-class youth in present-day Japan, with, at its core, an enigmatic heroine struggling to reconcile her divided desires.

To its great credit, this is not an easy film to get a fix on—its default tone is off-kilter, tilting at times toward the uncanny and eerie. What does eventually become clear is that Hamaguchi’s film is a truly original riff on the doppelgänger touchstone that is Vertigo, an enchanting, unnerving paean to the notion of love as a trance state.

Its story pinpoints spectral qualities of the uncanny and unpredictable that can cling to relationships over time. It has the frame’s edge paranoia of Jacques Rivette's films and the unpredictable life flow of those by Jacques Rozier.