This year’s Oscar for Best International Film went to a cool, intriguing Japanese film called Drive My Car.
Part of the appeal of the film – directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi – was its resolute refusal to go where you expected. That and its determination to take its time getting there.
You could say the same about another film by Hamaguchi – Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.
Photo: Screenshot
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was actually shot at the same time as Drive My Car – it was finished when the bigger film was closed down by the Covid lockdowns.
Because Wheel of Fortune was smaller in scale – it’s three cut-back, short stories with a bare minimum of characters – it was able to be completed first. And won the Jury Prize at last year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a cryptic name for three deceptively simple stories, all told in a few, very long shots, and all with a woman in her thirties as the lead character.
The first – ‘Magic or something less assuring’ – starts with a photographic model Meiko driving home with production assistant Gumi. They talk about Gumi’s new boyfriend, a man who sounds very familiar to Meiko.
The second, ‘Door wide open’, sees a married woman having an affair with a feckless, younger man, who wants her to help him set a trap for his professor.
But when she agrees to go along with it, things take an unexpected turn.
The third and for me, the best of the three stories is called ‘Once again’. A woman goes back to her old home town for a school reunion – she normally hates that sort of thing.
The next day at the railway station, she spots the woman she actually went to the reunion to find.
But every event isn’t quite what the characters expected going in, nor is it what we expect as an audience. The pace is leisurely, sometimes they almost feel like they’re happening in real time.
And then each suddenly pivots on an unexpected time shift. It’s the next day, or five years later, or even two goes at the same event, with different outcomes.
And there are unusual setups. Models and millionaires. A student prostrating himself before his professor. An alternative present where the Internet closes forever, forcing people to get back to writing letters, while the tech giants go out of business.
And each time, nobody seems too phased by a new normal. Very odd.
The stripped back aesthetic is strangely hypnotic – as it was in Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car.
The stories are told in long, medium wide shots, so your attention is engaged following what’s going on, rather than trying to guess where the story might go in the future.
What’s going on is entirely in the hands of the lead character. These three women aren’t necessarily easy to like. They can be selfish, easily persuaded and manipulative. And they can be mistaken – particularly in matters of the heart.
All three stories have a moment when the lead character looks back on a key moment in their life. Was that person really the love of her life? Or should they have been? Or was it all a terrible error of judgement?
In many ways, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is an old-fashioned art film – director Hamaguchi freely admits his debt to 1950s French New Wave directors like Eric Rohmer. It’s also quite engrossing once you get on its wave-length.
The final story in particular is absolutely delightful, with its blend of lost love, mistaken identities and an unexpected happy ending. Who could ask for anything more?
