Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fame and Fortune was overshadowed by the success of his adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Drive My Car, but it, too, ranks as one of 2021's better films. The film consists of a trio of episodes linked only by a thematic concern with the effects of chance and happenstance upon people. The film is extremely talky, but I don't mean this in a pejorative way. Hamaguchi's dialogue is rich and multilayered, equal to our finest playwrights and authors, including Murakami. Parts of the film reminded me of Neil LaBute with its depiction of a social landscape teeming with sexual manipulation and emotional insularity. However, the film's most obvious forebear is Eric Rohmer.

Rohmer's work has always been divisive. Gene Hackman's character in Arthur Penn's Night Moves compares seeing a Rohmer film to watching paint dry and I'm sure many of today's ADD afflicted cinema goers would concur. However, I'm a big fan of Rohmer's dry sense of humor and moral probity and found the same intellectual rigor in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. My comparison is not arbitrary since Hamaguchi himself has cited Rohmer's Rendezvous in Paris as Wheel of Fortuner and Fantasy's primary influence.

Most interchanges between people are not moments of romantic and violent passion or comic pratfalls (i.e. the stuff of most commercial cinema), but simple conversations. This is the pith of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. In the first episode, one woman tells another of a magical date she experienced the day before. The women are sitting in the back of a taxi. Hamaguchi films them almost entirely in a simple two shot which goes on for about ten minutes in length. This may be like watching paint dry for some, but I found it to be a thrilling moment of real time cinema. Hamaguchi's simplicity of technique sharpens our focus on the extraordinary performance of his two actresses. Of course, we later learn that more is going on in the scene than is first apparent, which only heightens the importance of this deceptively simple scene in one's mind's eye.

Hamaguchi is not averse to cinematic effects, but uses them sparingly. A revelation over tea inspires a zoom into one character's face, stressing her devastation and isolation. When a script has the sharp dialogue and humanistic insight that World of Fortune and Fantasy has, bells, whistles, and CGI multiverses are not needed.