Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Among the best dialogues I've ever seen. Touching, emotional and very smart. It's the kind of film that you need to be 100% on it but it really worths. All these characters seem real and it's all about life choices.

This was my second Hamaguchi film of the year (the other being "Drive My Car"), and I'm starting to think I just don't vibe with his style.

To be fair to this movie, I'm not a fan of anthology films, so it was my choice to watch one. And I also watched it assuming that it would be similar in style to "Drive My Car" (it is) and knowing that I wasn't in the mood for a movie like that (it was due back to the library the next day so I felt forced to watch it).

I just get very restless watching Hamaguchi films. They're static and feel very long. Perhaps my favorite movie of 2021 was "Mass," a film that's mostly four characters talking in a single setting for two hours, so it's not like I'm resistant to the kinds of movies Hamaguchi makes. They just don't speak to me for some vague reason, even as I can see that they're objectively very good movies.

Grade: B+

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a Japanese anthology film told as three dialogue-driven vignettes, about an unexpected dating mix-up, a malicious seduction, and a misunderstanding between strangers. The three shorts are not love stories, but rather stories about love in the face of coincidence.

Written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the man behind the currently Oscar-nominated Drive My Car, the film evokes drama out of everyday mundanity.

If you had Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy on mute, you wouldn't see anything visually dramatic happening. There's no violence, chases, or explosions. Hamaguchi delivers three dramatically engaging conversations on film, much like a theatrical play. What the dialogue churns out of its characters is remarkable, ranging from the dark, the perverse, and the deceitful. It covers every color of the emotional spectrum, which I suspect was Hamaguchi's goal.

The film brilliantly steers clear of the trappings of anthology films. The three segments are in a perfect balance with each other and all serve the film's overall theme. There was no best segment out of the three, which is quite impressive.

After seeing Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, I thought about the everyday quality of life and how often that is forgotten as being dramatic. What the film explores is in a similar artistic area that the HBO show Mare of Easttown was exploring earlier this year.

Every dramatic moment in life tends to be a person in front of you about to reveal something for better or worse. And life just all seems like luck of the draw. This theme washed over me and I recollected similar moments in my own life afterward.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy captures its idea with impressive precision and also with a whimsical smile on its face. They don't really make films like this anymore and I'm glad someone brought it back. I look forward to seeing Drive My Car now.

The director showed how to create an amazing story with just a fixed scene and two actors talking to each other with some very good dialogs.

With mise-en-scène that strongly resemblance of a stage play, there's an undeniable sort of distance between the viewers and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. At least for a while. But then Hamaguchi Ryûsuke was able to break the distance with his direction that felt both intimate and personal. In the end, the film has a lasting impact, even long after the end credit rolls.