If Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Passion - essentially a
student project, remarkably – pushes its characters and situations too hard at many
points, it’s perhaps only out of a surfeit of infectious earnestness and curiosity.
It would be worth seeing if only for an extraordinary central sequence in which
a young teacher, Kaho, leads her class in talking about a classmate who recently
killed himself, taking them through a consideration of modes of violence and appropriate
responses. It seems doubtful that Kaho’s reasoning and conclusions are entirely
coherent either to the film’s audience or to the pupils, and yet the process succeeds
in prompting one classmate to volunteer that he had bullied the dead boy, and
for others to follow, an early example of Hamaguchi’s interest in shifting and
synthesis. The intertwining of choice and instinct and responsibility also informs
the film’s main narrative, focused on the possibly misaligned desires of Kaho’s
fiancée Tomoya and of his two friends, one of whom almost certainly loves Kaho
more fully and alertly than Tomoya does himself, but without her reciprocation.
That’s one of the movie’s many points of confusion and absence: it’s notable
that the dead boy is never seen, or even referred to before that scene, echoing
against a much-referenced cat, also deceased just before the events in the
film, who when alive influenced the living arrangements of several characters. Passion
has a playful side, but frequently seems to teeter on the edge of greater anger
and danger, or of more fully expressed emotion and sexuality in general, albeit
often with a sense of throwing stuff out there just to see if it works (and
then, if it doesn’t, of leaving it in the final cut regardless). Still, the film
is more absorbingly provocative than many more fully-achieved works (even some
of Hamaguchi’s own, possibly).
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