Film Review: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Images courtesy of Potential Films.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s second feature release of the last year is a beguiling three-in-one Lego set of lean, focused short-form storytelling.

Within weeks of the masterful Drive My Car winning Best International Feature at the 94th Academy Awards, acclaimed Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, is set to release in Australia this Thursday. The film is an anthology of three “episodes” that run for around forty minutes – each effectively a short film in its own right – that is at turns enthralling and inscrutable. Those who saw Drive My Car, or indeed earlier Hamaguchi films like Asako I & II and Happy Hour, will recognise Wheel’s deliberate pace and observant human detail: each of the three vignettes, while not connected narratively (and thematically so only in subtle ways) exhibits the director’s empathy and focus.

The first of the triptych is entitled Magic (or Something Less Assuring). It follows Meiko, who listens to her friend Tsugumi tell a story of an enchanting romantic encounter and then goes to have an emotional confrontation with her ex-boyfriend Kazuaki. 

The next ‘episode’, Door Wide Open, is the story of Nao, a married mother and uni student. Nao is sleeping with Sasaki, a fellow student who holds a bitter resentment toward a professor, Segawa, who failed him for a class – Sasaki believes he can have Nao seduce him and ruin his reputation. 

The final short is titled Once Again, and starts off a little more high-concept: in an alternate universe in which a worldwide computer virus forced people back to telegrams and the mail, Natsuko and Aya reconnect after their high school reunion. 

As decidedly non-earth-shattering as each of these premises are, Hamaguchi wrings dramatic tension from every possible moment. They are, it’s worth noting, three short films of mostly two-way dialogue and very little else, and yet Hamaguchi’s narratives carry a sense of such intention that their scope and technical simplicity never feels limiting. 

Shorts, particularly presented one after the other, can often feel like exercises in technique: like still-life fruit paintings, or a poem-every-day-of-the-month challenge. Perhaps Hamaguchi intends this effect: the simple episodic juxtaposition, as unadorned as it is, takes three distinct stories and suggests a mind fixating on the same few themes through different lenses. As the credits roll on each episode, you’re watching a kind of canvas being wiped over and started again. 

Indeed, the experience of Wheel is self-clarifying. The stories all dilute as they go on: the amount of characters in focus gets smaller, the assumed premise falls away into a study of a relationship and the people inside it. And the personalities are drawn so sharply. Hamaguchi’s characters are uncannily lucid about themselves and their behaviour, which they often express with surprising frankness. In this world, people are propelled inexorably by their nature.

To wit, the stories in Wheel all have a way of ending where the action doesn’t seem entirely resolved, but the lead character has made a decision. What Hamaguchi finds in this collection of human stories is unmistakably, truth. Things don’t always tie themselves into a bow neatly, but oftentimes the best thing we can do is just to move forward.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is screening in cinemas from Thursday 28th of April. For tickets and more info, click here.