Film Review: "Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy" ("偶然と想像") (2021).

From the director of Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) comes Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy (偶然と想像). This Japanese romantic drama anthology film written and directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi. An unexpected love triangle, a failed seduction trap and an encounter that results from a misunderstanding are the three episodes, told in three movements to depict three female characters and trace the trajectories between their choices and regrets.

The three stories were actually designed as the three of a group of seven stories, which have all been written already. The first two were shot in late 2019, and the third one was shot in July 2020, in the midst of the long break in the shooting of Drive My Car (2021) due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The film stars Kotone Furukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Ayumu Nakajima, Hyunri, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Shouma Kai, and Aoba Kawai. Buoyed by the three captivating performances from its three unheralded actresses, the film is a fascinating, towering confection of contradictions. The three actresses are excellent. They will no doubt attract most attention, impressive in their ability to inhabit very different characters, yet they are the power at the heart of the film. Hamaguchi keeps us guessing as to whether the characters' longings are innate or instilled by something beyond them and us.

Hamaguchi’s slow-burning, two-hour meditation on romance, marriage, seduction and connection. With great warmth and poignancy, Hamaguchi's film is perhaps one of the most satisfyingly nuanced portraits of the profundity lurking beneath the day-to-day grind. Hagamuchi does not waste the two hour film time and allows us to get to know, intimately, each of the ladies, their lives, hopes and fears. Hamaguchi offers great perspectives into the dynamics of romance, marriage and the unknowability of others, shedding surprising light on the men in these women's lives in his final acts. Hamaguchi proposes a life-world in which the experiences that are really supposed to rearrange our daily identities actually do. By spending so much time with these ordinary women, we see them fully in all their thorny complications.

In the film, and particularly in that beautiful scene on the ferry, the world is not just gliding by-it is being slid into place before our eyes, as if for the first time. The film commands respect through the audacity of its conception and scale, and it earns affection through its humane attentiveness. Hamaguchi is a genius of scene construction, turning the fierce poetry of painfully revealing and pugnaciously wounding dialogue into powerful drama that's sustained by a seemingly spontaneous yet analytically precise visual architecture. Running at two hours, Hamaguchi's movie foregrounds the quotidian, revealing the latent drama in the most seemingly mundane moments. It is refreshing to see a Japanese film that is modern and direct and not trying to be overtly Ozu-y or arthouse poetic or genre-y, yet very Japanese. I very much appreciate Hamaguchi's work.

Simon says Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy (偶然と想像) receives:

Also, see my review for Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー).