Spielberg did it in 1993. Now the director of the Oscar winning DRIVE MY CAR, Ryusuke Hamaguchi has done it too. Released two fantastic films in the same year.
Hot on the heels of DRIVE MY CAR’s Academy Award win, comes WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, a triptych spectacular featuring an unexpected love triangle, a failed honey trap and a life altering encounter that results from a mistaken identity.
There’s an elegiac eroticism surrounding the three stories, each one presented in delicate nuance, like finely calibrated calligraphy, deft strokes of story telling, subtly teasing out hooks and reveals.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY explores three female-centred short stories thematically linked by coincidence, regret, and imagination.
In the first story, two women share a cab from a photo shoot. The topic of conversation is the burgeoning romance one of them has embarked upon. As they chat in the back seat of the taxi, it dawns on the other woman that the new man in her acquaintance’s life is her recently shed lover.
In a seeming case of I don’t want him but you can’t have him either, the old lover confronts the man to gauge the seriousness of the new affair and whether they have ever really gotten over one another.
In lesser hands, this scenario could have been played out as melodrama, but Hamaguchi is anything but ham-fisted as he massages the story through changing dynamics to an astonishing conclusion.
The second story concerns a vexatious plot to destroy the reputation of a professor. To please her young, petulant lover, a mature age student plots to compromise an academic over a perceived slight. In the process she reads a slab of highly erotic prose from the novel that the professor has just published. It becomes a “gotcha” moment of sublime surprise.
The third story begins with a chance encounter between two women when a spark of recognition kindles a slow burn revelation. Past lives are examined, present lives explored and a future life holds exquisite expectations.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY is definitely some kind of masterpiece, a set of stories that will stay with you long after viewing and probably prompt you, like me, to see it again.