Hush!

After the great success of Like Grains of Sand (winner of the Tiger Award in 1996) it was five years before Hashigushi completed another film. Hush! is again about gay relationships, friendship, loneliness and family, but now in the form of a fresh and appealing melodrama. Hashigushi exchanged the starkly framed photography of Like Grains of Sand for a looser style, but the elegance and eye for detail with which the story unfolds has been retained. Hashigushi manages to do justice to all his characters and the many narrative lines and themes.We first see the three protagonists separate, before their lives cross. Naoya works in a pet shop and goes out a lot in the gay scene, but has the feeling he is missing something in his relaxed and pretty selfish life. When he meets Katsuhiro, he falls in love. Katsuhiro keeps his homosexuality hidden from his family and his surroundings, including a male colleague who is in love with him. The third protagonist is Asako, a woman with a history of mental illness and a desire for children. When Katsuhiro treats her in a fatherly way in a very brief encounter in a restaurant, she decides that he would be the ideal father. Her desire of course causes problems in the relationship between Naoya and Katsuhiro. The complex threecornered relationship reaches a comic and tragic peak during an unexpected visit by the family of Katsuhiro.