The three segments that form Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s airy, polished Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy aren’t exactly love stories as we tend to think of them. Each episode hints at the shape of a more familiar, conventional romance, but then Hamaguchi spins the wheel. Chance comes into play, for better or worse. Characters turn to fantasy, and their escapes–sometimes solo and sometimes shared–can be disorienting, giddy, healing, risky, or revelatory. Hamaguchi has a particular interest in collaborative fantasies, whether he’s showing two lonely people feeling an inconvenient but deeply moving erotic frisson or a kind of playful but sincere improvised therapy session between strangers. These scenes land beautifully, and you could hardly ask for better examples of how intimate and revealing it can be to engage with or create fiction.
The first story–“Magic (or Something Less Assuring)” follows Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), who suffers through the particular torment of being trapped in a car with someone who has just had an incredible romantic experience and wants to tell her all about it. Her best friend just spent hours sharing secrets and caresses with a man who just met, someone who already feels like he could be the love of her life. She’s glowing with happiness and excitement, and good for her, but everything she’s relating is, secondhand, trite rather than meaningful. We think we’re in sympathy with Meiko, who’s possibly doing her best to be encouraging, but it eventually turns out that what Meiko has been feeling is far more particular. While her friend is caught up in a tale of fate, Meiko is experiencing the vicissitudes of chance, and her emotional upheaval is much more tumultuous and dangerous. This is the weakest of the segments, maybe because it keeps us at a distance, but there are still moments in it that are nail-bitingly tense.
Things really kick off with “Door Wide Open,” where nontraditional college student Nao (Katsuki Mori)–older, married, and already a mother–is wheedled into honey trapping one of her former professors. Segawa (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) is closed-off, guarded and introverted in an intense, chilly way that many people seem to find off-putting, but he’s just had a major career triumph: a prize-winning novel. Nao reads one of its erotic scenes aloud to him, in an excruciatingly awkward (and funny) scene that seems to stretch on for an hour, trying to spur some kind of incriminating response. What she actually gets is a sense of connection–these are two odd, lonely people who, in the unlikeliest of circumstances, hit upon something real. The “chance” element comes into play here in a way that feels genuinely crushing.
The final and most hopeful segment is “Once Again,” set–in an unnecessary but meaningful move–in an alternate reality where data breaches have basically shut down all forms of internet contact. Natsuko (Fusako Urabe), in town for her twenty-year reunion, happens to pass her one-time girlfriend on the train station escalators: the two reunite joyfully, with Natsuko shedding all her awkwardness from the evening’s reunion and becoming someone bolder and more open. It’s been a long time, but she really only has one question she needs to ask: Are you happy? The answer is complicated, to say the least. It leads the two women into a strange form of role play, one that’s ultimately healing for them both.
In addition to fortune and fantasy, a common thread through all three stories seems to be the necessity of emotional vulnerability: in particular, the vulnerability of being sincere in a world that doesn’t always reward you for it. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy doesn’t argue that openness and sincerity–the willingness to look weird or silly or over-invested–will always work out, but it does show how beautiful it is when that vulnerability is met with kindness or, better yet, reciprocation. Love is about destroying the illusion that you’re cool and finding someone whose weirdness matches your own. Hopefully the wheel will then spin in your favor.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
