This was the other film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi that was released in the same year as Drive My Car to similar critical acclaim. It’s anthology of three stories, all written by the director himself and all featuring a very feminine perspective. They’re very talky stories about romantic entanglements, unusually so for a male director, and it’s true that they are exceptional in drawing the viewer in and holding your attention. Still the situations are sometimes very contrived and it’s distinctly inferior to Drive My Car. It’s not bad, but not really what I like either.

In the first story, two women best friends have a long conversation in a taxi. Tsugumi gushes to Meiko about a new guy she met, how they instantly connected and might already be in love. After the taxi drops Tsugumi off, Meiko immediately rushes to an office to confront the guy who of course turns out to be her own ex-boyfriend. The second story involves Nao, a housewife who has gone back to university, attempting to seduce a professor Segawa who has won a literature prize for his novel. She does this by reading a passage from his novel which describes an erotic scene. The third story is about a woman, Natsuko, who travels back to her home town for a high school reunion but is disappointed not to see the person she wants to see. Then on the street she runs into just that person and they go have tea at her house but it turns out to be a case of mistaken identity.

All three stories are women-centric and are all effectively long conversations that are about romantic or sexual relationships. The director’s magic is in writing and filming dialogue that feels lively and engaging despite them taking place in mostly mundane contexts. The first story is my least favorite of the lot. It relies on the coincidence of Tsugumi’s new potential boyfriend being Meiko’s ex and in the end just ends up being the usual love triangle that is of no real interest to me. The second story is more interesting and Nao reading an erotic passage is of course a fantastic scene. Yet it also relies on her being a very specific, and I feel, contrived type of character: a seemingly content housewife in most respects but is nonetheless addicted to sex with men other than her husband. The story dodges any real examination of her character and only focuses on how the professor and her seemingly find some common ground in his work while the professor himself remains scrupulously ethical in meeting her.

The third story is the best of the lot. My favorite detail here is that it exploits the Japanese sense of wanting to be polite and fit in. The second woman doesn’t actually recognize Natsuko but pretends to at first in order to be polite until it becomes too obvious to both that neither person is who the other one thought. Still they manage to become friends of a sort and provide closure to each other. I feel it’s unnecessary to explain that this is specifically set in a world in which a computer virus has temporarily made online communications impossible and leaked everyone’s data. Otherwise, I find it to be an original and meaningful story.

Even so, I’m not really a big fan of this collection of stories overall. They feel a little too small in scope and too mundane, more like exercises in writing and acting than a complete film. I definitely see how this and Drive My Car were made by the same director with its thematic similarities and the same delicate touch for capturing human conversation. It’s not bad but there’s no comparison with Drive My Car.