A love triangle between two friends.  A seduction trap went awry.  A chance encounter between two ex-lovers.  These are the stories of love, anger, and loss that fill the screen in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s anthology Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, released in the USA by Film Movement after an acclaimed festival run. 

The film opens with a segment entitled “Magic” as it follows two friends, Tsugumi (Hyunri) and Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), in a car ride home from work. Tsugumi tells her younger friend about the new man she is seeing, the successful Kazuaki (Ayumu Nakajima), and her excitement for the future of their relationship. When Tsugumi is dropped off at her home, instead of following her, Hamaguchi instead keeps us with Meiko. It is the first of many deviations from the norm that we will experience in these tales. Meiko is dropped off at an office building where she meets Kazuaki and we learn that they are ex-lovers themselves, though not everything may be resolved. As the segment draws to a close, the three characters all meet by chance at a tea shop and Hamaguchi begins to blur the lines of reality as he leans into the magic realism which oftentimes haunts his narratives. In this instance, it is an imagined scenario in which Meiko reclaims her ex and fractures her friendship with Tsugumi, but with a simple pan from the camera we learn this was all in her head and we see her actual actions. That is the other hallmark of Hamaguchi’s style when he does get a little weird: it is always presented subtlety yet clearly. 

The credits roll over some soft piano music and we enter into the middle act of the film entitled “Door Wide Open.” The strongest segment of the film by far, the story focuses on Nao (Katsuki Mori), an older and married university student who engages in an affair with a younger student, Sasaki (Shouma Kai). When Segawa (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), a literature professor at their school, is recognized with an award for his newest novel, Sasaki is enraged as he had been punished by the professor and wants to ruin his career. Sasaki convinces Nao to meet with Segawa and, while secretly recording him, engage in an affair with the professor to disgrace his legacy. If “Magic” contained the Fantasy promised by the title, “Door Wide Open” provides the Fortune, however, it is not always good fortune for those involved. The truly tragic story unfolds and spirals deeper than we can imagine at the onset, especially given that “Magic” ends before we can see the fallout of those actions. In “Door Wide Open,” nothing is left unsaid and the result is as tragic as it is painful, yet so beautiful in its simplicity.

As with all anthologies, one segment is always the weakest, and “Once Again” takes that title here. It is not without merit, however, opening on the strong premise that in the not-so-distant future, the world had to go offline as a global computer virus would send files out that were saved on various cloud servers disclosing personal, trade, and military secrets to random people across the globe. The premise makes us wonder if this story will link the previous two together as cogs on the overarching Wheel; it does not. In fact, the opening premise – delivered through title cards – does not play much into the following story at all involving Moka (Fusako Urabe) and Nana (Aoba Kawai) in a case of possible mistaken or forgotten, identity. Its construction is almost an exaggeration of what came before it, taking long extended scenes in a single location and here setting almost the entirety of the story in the living room of Nana’s house. The two actresses are very engaged with each other, but as a story, it is missing that spark to really engage and capture the audience.  

Produced in tandem with Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning film Drive My Car (2021) when Covid-19 upended the production schedules, the two films appear at peace with one another, notably the 41-minute opening sequence to Drive My Car feels like it could be a segment from Wheel as it shares many of the same themes and tones. The biggest difference between the two is that Drive My Car ends much more optimistically than the stories presented in Wheel, except for perhaps “Magic” which seems to end prematurely compared to “Door Wide Open” and “Once Again.” Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is akin to ordering a flight at the new brewery in town. We get a good sampling of the themes and emotions that captivate and drive Hamaguchi’s longer works, and while not everything here works in this truncated form, the individual story elements tend to be enough to keep us intrigued enough to find out what will happen next. They almost all certainly would have benefitted from being expanded into their own unique feature presentations instead of as a collection because Hamaguchi is a writer/director like no other working today who not only asks the big questions in life but seeks to answer them as well, even if those answers are wide and unwieldy and take time to arrive at. He has a knack for distilling the wild nature of human emotions into singular scenes, but the process cannot and should not be rushed.