Paper short abstract:

In Hashiguchi Ryōsuke’s film Hush!, an unusual “love triangle” between a thirty-something gay couple and a single straight woman opens up the possibility of a novel kind of family - an arrangement the film validates compared to the options of rootless promiscuity and normative heterosexual monogamy.

Paper long abstract:

The Japanese poster for Hashiguchi Ryōsuke’s film Hush! (Hasshu, 2001) used the tagline “21st-century pregancy reveal”; in France, the film was advertised with the slogan “La nouvelle famille”. These phrases point to a concern with the redefinition of family norms which, if anything, seems all the more contemporary two decades on.

At the heart of Hashiguchi’s film is the contradiction between personal inclination and free choice, on the one hand, and the defining limits of biology and society on the other. In films such as A Touch of Fever (Hatachi no binetsu, 1993) and Like Grains of Sand (Nagisa no shindobaddo, 1995), the director, himself openly gay, explored the challenges facing young gay people in Heisei-era Japan. The focus of Hush! is broader; the film reflects on the difficulties faced both by homosexual and heterosexual characters who chafe against the limited options open to them, and contrives a novel solution.

Hush! dramatises an unusual “love triangle” - the relationship between a thirty-something gay couple and a single straight woman. After a series of unsatisfactory romantic relationships, Asako (Kataoka Reiko) wants a child without wanting a husband or boyfriend; Katsuhiro (Tanabe Seiichi) and Naoya (Takahashi Kazuya) are happily partnered, but as a same-sex couple have written off the possibility of having children. In a fashion somewhat reminiscent of screwball comedy, a chance encounter brings the trio together to fulfill each other’s goals.

Hashiguchi juxtaposes the choices made by these characters with the contrasting options of rootless promiscuity and normative heterosexual monogamy, both of which the film finds unsatisfactory. In the context of the relatively conservative social mores and political environment of early twenty-first century Japan, a country which when the film was made (and indeed still at the time of writing) did not recognise same-sex marriage and in which surrogacy is not widely accepted, the alternative that the film proposes can be fulfilled only through serendipity and is arguably imagined as a form of wish fulfillment. Yet it nevertheless hints at new and more flexible options for family formation.