Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Prior to his critical hit Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi directed a distinctive work made up of three separate tales.
The sheer quality of the filmmaking in Drive My Car (2021) earned worldwide acclaim for its writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Now we have another recent film of his, one that is highly original but far more uneven. This is not a backward step, however, for Hamaguchi made Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy just before starting work on Drive My Car. It's an unusual venture in that it consists of three totally distinct sections. Thus it echoes those portmanteau films popular in the 1950s which often offered a number of tales by noted writers such as Somerset Maugham or O. Henry and in putting them together assigned each section to a different director. Here, though, the three tales presented are screen originals and Hamaguchi both wrote and directed all of them.
The other element common to all three is that in each case the central figure is a woman. In the first ‘Magic (or Something Less Assuring)’ a fashion model, Meiko (Kotone Furukawa) discovers that her former boyfriend (Ayumu Nakajima) is now involved with her best friend (Hyunri) and reacts accordingly. The second, ‘Door Wide Open’, centres on a married woman having an affair – that's Nao (Katsuki Mori) – who comes under the influence of her lover (Shouma Kai). She is persuaded to help him by seducing a teacher (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), this being a honey trap to ruin his reputation undertaken as an act of revenge. Finally, in ‘Once Again’, a school reunion taking place twenty years on results in Moka (Fusako Urabe) encountering a woman (Aoba Kawai) whom she takes to be her first youthful true love.
All three tales are well acted but, as often with portmanteau films, their quality varies. The first is the most effective since Meiko’s responses to her ex's new relationship are unexpected and invite us to interpret her motives. It's thoroughly intriguing to do so even if you may feel that it's a bit of a cop-out to be given alternative endings showing Meiko in two very different lights. However, that device does draw attention to the fact that this is a piece of storytelling and that could be regarded as apt. I say that because the sense of being offered a story to be relished for its own sake as an enjoyable fiction rather than a narrative that seems wholly real colours the rest of the film. Consequently, it does not detract too much if Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy sometimes tends to feel like a work about women written by a man. What does matter is that by the time we reach Once Again the tale being told seems too clever by half. Are the two women ex-lovers or not? Is it a case of mistaken identity or of role-playing? If the first two stories draw one in, this last one comes across increasingly as a writer’s set-up rather than anything else. Nevertheless, the acting maintains its quality throughout and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy however mixed in quality contains much that does appeal.
Original title: Gûzen to sôzô.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Kotone Furukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Hyunri, Kiyohiko, Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Shouma Kai, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai.
Dir Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Pro Satoshi Takada, Screenplay Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Ph Yukiko Iioka, Pro Des Masato Nunobe and Hyeon-Seon Seo, Ed Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Costumes Fuminori Usui.
Fictive/NEOPA-Modern Films.
121 mins. Japan. 2021. US Rel: 15 October 2021. UK Rel: 11 February 2022. Cert. 15.