The delightful winner of the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Berlin festival, and the second film from Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi in three months, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is not quite the equal of the same film-maker’s Oscar contender, Drive My Car. Both films, however, share a deceptively languid pacing and find an aching humanity in middle-class people in crisis.
Hamaguchi once again pulls off an impressive temporal trick. This emerging writer-director’s milieu – including the 317-minute Happy Hour – is too absorbing and too defined by melodramatic reversals and reveals for the viewer to clock the expansive run time. This latest portmanteau comprises three (long) short stories that owe as much to Eric Rohmer as they do to Haruki Murakami.
The episodes begin with Magic (or Something Less Assuring), as Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), a girlish model, shares a taxi with her best friend, Tsugumi (Hyunri), just after the latter has enjoyed a meaningful date with a “hottie”. Something in Tsugumi’s account prompts her chum to turn the cab around. It’s a fine twist even if the story feels as if it is missing a narrative beat.
The second and weakest section, Door Wide Open, concerns a student who persuades his lover to partake in a honey trap for the professor who flunked him. The plan does not go as he hoped but in what can only be described as sustained erotic cringe.
The final and most satisfying tale takes place in a world where an internet virus has wiped out everyday interconnectivity. Once Again concerns two women who misrecognise each other after many years. Moka (Urabe) thinks she has found her ex-girlfriend, whereas Nana (Kawai) mistakes Moka for an old classmate.
This case of mistaken identity is role-played into a lovely sense of catharsis and togetherness. It’s perhaps no accident that this closing and absorbing chapter shares DNA with the unlikely friendship at the heart of Drive My Car.
