Saturday, October 17, 2026 at 7:30 PM
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
*Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Yanai Initiative* It’s understandable if, at the end of *Like Nothing Happened*, one finds oneself in agreement with the title. Four college students, old friends and new acquaintances, spend an afternoon at a racetrack and then go their separate ways. Loose and grainy, it looks and feels like a sketch but shot at a time when writer-director-actor Ryusuke Hamaguchi says he was interested in “how to arrange the gazes of characters,” there’s a lot working under the surface. Structured around the kind of conversational set pieces that would become hallmarks of Hamaguchi’s later films, including an extended Dadaist recitation of dictionary definitions on a train, *Like Nothing Happened *feels very much like where it all began.—*Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm * DCP. Director/Screenwriter: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tomo Matsui, Hideyuki Okamoto. Ryusuke Hamaguchi's graduate thesis film at Tokyo University of the Arts, *Passion* prefigures the more complex and assured *Happy Hour* as a seemingly tight-knit group of friends and lovers falls apart as they navigate the transition to the next phases of their lives. Here, like Hamaguchi himself at the time, the carefully class-coded characters are younger, just entering careers, marriage and parenthood — or else grasping for ways to put them off. The capriciousness of desire emerges as a force and an excuse in a series of high-wire dialogue scenes as Hamaguchi explores the ethics of coupling and camerawork alike.—*Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm * DCP. Director/Screenwriter: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With: Aoba Kawai, Ryuta Okamoto, Kiyohiko Shibukawa.