Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a collection of three short films, all concerning the unmooring after-lives of faded relationships. Each episode pivots on individuals attempting elaborate reconstructions of romances and friendships, involving everything from various manipulations to outright playacting for the sake of a long-delayed catharsis. The film is a story of hauntings, then, in which the ghost looks different to each teller, and Hamaguchi exquisitely captures the agony of attempting an impossible resurrection, as well as the emotional distances between friends and lovers who, because they essentially occupy differing realities, remember events in vastly different ways.
In its very title, the first episode, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” conjures the thin line between rapture and melancholia that governs Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy as a whole. Meiko (Furukawa Kotone) and Tsugumi (Hyunri) are first seen modeling, or peddling the sorts of pop-cultural illusions—namely the implication of getting what you want for looking just right—that can infect the expectations we carry into real relationships. Sharing a taxi, Tsugumi tells Meiko of a man she recently met and the intoxicating date they spent together. She describes a “storybook” night, replete with the lame in-jokes we concoct with those we love, and Meiko listens to her with an ambiguous mixture of encouragement and skepticism. Tsugumi’s story of her date isn’t mere setup, but a complete tale in itself, a blossoming of potential romance that we’re allowed to share in, enjoy, and speculate on; in the tradition of many good early dates, it suggests a fragile reality with the potential of becoming concrete. But Meiko has a secret: From Tsugumi’s story she recognizes the man to be her ex, Kazuaki (Nakajima Ayumu), whom she visits after dropping Tsugumi off at her home.
Meiko is incensed to hear her relationship with Kazuaki filtered through the perspective of Tsugami, who claims that he was heartbroken over his breakup with Meiko. And what follows is an intense verbal duel in which Meiko attempts to regain ownership of the story of that relationship. Throughout, Hamaguchi’s writing is sharp, intricate, merciless, and his precise compositions evoke an escalating sensation of there being no escape. Meiko becomes an avenging angel, castigating Kazuaki for his sexual incompetency, his illusion of vulnerability, his compensating success—in other words, whatever subject will grant her dominion.
In a lesser film, Meiko might have been reduced to a man’s castration fantasy, but Hamaguchi allows us to see the palpable pain underneath her bitterness. Still, you may be most sympathetic to the off-screen Tsugami, whose naïve projection of a new relationship is being sullied without her knowledge. And our empathy for her springs in part from a common anxiety: over our lovers’ romantic pasts. Most times, we aren’t the only one, or even the most memorable one and our relationships are subject to influences beyond our conception.
The seeds of romantic exploitation that exist in “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring)” reach full bloom in the film’s second and most daring episode, “Door Wide Open,” which concerns two, maybe three overlapping stories of intimate gamesmanship. Nao (Mori Katsuki) and Sasaki (Kai Shouma) are college students and friends with benefits separated by a gulf of experience. Nao is a wife and mother returning to school later in life and clearly riven with insecurity, while Sasaki is casually smug in a fashion that springs from being so young and inexperienced that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Hamaguchi viscerally establishes these contrasts within seconds, showing how Sasaki gradually lords Nao’s feelings of displacement over her, goading her into setting a “honey trap” for a professor, Segawa (Shibukawa Kiyohiko), who’s recently published an acclaimed novel.
The resulting scene, a prolonged duet between Nao and Segawa in the latter’s college office, suggests how easily emotional manipulations can become legitimate kinship only to be commodified by an outside society that has no clue as to what truly transpired between the people involved in the matter. Given the scenario—a sexual conversation between a female student and a male teacher—it’s impossible not to think of it in a #MeToo context. Yet the brilliance of the episode resides in its lack of conventional op-ed confrontationality; Hamaguchi takes an extreme situation and sees it tenderly on its own thorny and irresolvable terms, fashioning a vignette that suggests an unusually gentle Philip Roth story.
Nao visits Segawa’s office at the school where he works and reads a sexual scene from his novel to him, in which a woman carefully shaves a man’s genitals and brings him to climax. That scene, offered up in “Door Wide Open” as a mirror into Segawa’s anguished soul, is astonishing in its own right, and its resigned yet wistful evocation of male powerlessness (or feelings thereof) encourages Nao to take control with him in manner that she somehow can’t with Sasaki. Unlike Sasaki, these two have real experience and know of the perils of true intimacy. Riffing on his book, Segawa and Nao slip into a pseudo-role-play that fills missing pieces in each of their lives, fulfilling dormant fantasies and cauterizing past hurts. It’s a rapturous, nurturing, bottomless love scene of sorts—with echoes and echoes of overlapping past and present experiences—that’s redefined and defiled by outside forces such as Segawa, just as Meiko cheapens and harnesses Tsugumi’s meet cute with Kazuaki.
Reversing the bleak trajectory of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’s first two stories, “Once Again” feels like a palate cleanser, investing a role-play with comparatively sunnier and less neurotic dimensions. Two old acquaintances, Moka (Urabe Fusako) and Nana (Kawai Aoba), bump into each other in the wake of a high school reunion that the former didn’t attend. Moka invites Nana to her house for tea to talk of the old days, and it becomes clear that Nana has something on her mind. After an unexpected reveal, the women decide to play out alternate realities of themselves, so as to put certain lingering matters to bed. “Once Again” doesn’t have the intricacy of the first two episodes, but it gains in power upon reflection, enriching the rest of the film. If past relationships are such easily alterable realities in retrospect, homes to which we can never return, perhaps they can also be altered in the mind to the benefit of all involved. At its heart, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
