An ensemble drama about loves and losses of three vastly different (if loosely connected) people, Hashiguchi Ryosuke’s
Three Stories of Love (Koibito Tachi) began as a workshop project led by Hashiguchi himself. In writing the script, a process that took eight months, he tailored each of his stories to the personalities and strengths of his three leads, all unknowns cast from auditions, while drawing on his own life as a gay man who has wrestled with depression.
All of his films, beginning with Slight Touch of Fever (Hatachi no Binetsu), his 1993 feature debut about gay rent boys, have this personal element, though none are overtly autobiographical.
It’s hard to see any clear connection between Hashiguchi, so poised and eloquent on stage the Tokyo International Film Festival last October, where the film had its world premiere, and his hero Atsushi (Shinohara Atsushi), a chubby, gloomy, disheveled guy with an unusual gift: A bridge inspector, he checks concrete pilings using only a hammer, his keen hearing and his instincts.
But alone in his tiny, trash-strewn apartment, he mourns bitterly for his wife, killed three years earlier by a madman on the street.
Then there is Toko (Narushima Toko), a middle-aged housewife who drudges for her indifferent husband and complaining mother-in-law, while obsessively watching an old video of a now-distant, not-so-close encounter with Princess Masako. Fed up with her treadmill existence, she begins an affair with a scam artist (Mitsuishi Ken) who promises her, not the moon, but a chicken farm.
We also meet Shinomiya (Ikeda Ryo), a gay lawyer with a sardonic grin, an inflated self-regard and a younger lover he treats like dirt.
Then his life starts to fall apart – and he finds refuge with a school friend he once loved, who now has a wife and child.
The stories of Atsushi and Toko begin as exercises in miserabilist cinema, with their central characters mired in seemingly hopeless situations, while Shinoyama’s segment initially plays like pitch-dark comedy (including the ‘joke’ of the smirking hero being pushed down a flight of stone steps by an anonymous hand).
But as these stories develop, their central characters reveal unexpected facets that individualize and elevate them. They are, we see, feeling, thinking beings worthy of attention and, yes, love, for all their flaws. They are, in other words, real and familiar, even if we don’t see their exact reflections in our mirrors.
The three leads all create their performances from the inside out, with art that looks artless, but the stand-out is Narushima Toko. Her performance as Toko, from her slack-jawed stare at the TV screen to the ungainly herky-jerky dance she performs dressing and undressing, comically exposes an unglamorous private reality. But Toko’s total authenticity gives weight to her words when she finally explains her motives and dreams to her drugged-out lover. As strange as it sounds, she achieves a kind of grace that illuminates not only her life but ours.
To put it as simply and plainly as Toko might herself, Three Stories of Love was the best film released in Japan last year.