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A number of people in Amp, including this author, have a soft spot for Kiyohiko Shibukawa, an actor who has proven a true chameleon in the way he jumps from one part to another, with equal success. Shibukawa, born July 2, 1974, actually started his career as a fashion model under the name Kee. He started acting in TV with “Twinkle”, in 1998, and he got his first role in cinema in Toshiaki Toyoda's “Pornostar”, with him actually accompanying the director in most of his later works, something that actually happened with the rest of the filmmakers he was casted by over the years. These include, among others, Takashi Miike, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Eiji Uchida. Currently, his credits number 160, with the majority of them being non-protagonist roles, which, still, though do not prevent him from shining quite brightly, particularly to the more “trained” eye.

Without further ado, here are 10 of his most iconic performances,...

Was Ryûsuke Hamaguchi referencing the tarot when he wrote his Berlinale Silver Berlin Bear winning, and 2021 New York Film Festival selection, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy?

According to Tarot.com the wheel of fortune card in the upright position signifies change. The wheel turns in one continuous motion, churning events in a ceaseless progression of ups and downs, thus freeing us from the past. No one can escape its cyclical action. Hamaguchi weaves the same concept of the movement of time into this film which contains three short stories that follow the lives of women who are navigating love, loss, reconnection, and letting go.

Magic (Or something Less Assuming) is the first entry, and it follows Meiko (Kotone Furukawa) as she taunts and gaslights her ex-boyfriend Kazuaki (Ayumu Nakajima), who now has feelings for her best friend Tsugumi...

When Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi made his return to fiction after time away in the realm of documentary, he dispensed with the idea that stories must conform to feature length. “Happy Hour,” the sprawling ensemble drama that sparked interest in him among cinephiles, ran more than five hours, and while his latest, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” boasts a conventional enough running time of 121 minutes, the film is actually composed of three short stories, stitched together and somewhat arbitrarily presented as a single package.

The vignettes are, by the director’s own description, explorations of “coincidence and imagination” — the first three of what he conceived as seven stories, pointing toward what might have been another epic-length project. Audiences tend not to take well to coincidence in drama, which can feel unrealistic when handled clumsily. In Hamaguchi’s hands, however, lucky (or unlucky) twists don’t feel so much like manipulation...

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, after the excellent “Asako I&ii” seems to have established a specific style, contextually at least, that has “unremarkable” people experiencing remarkable, somewhat surrealistic events, and characters, particularly women, who exhibit behaviors that are exactly the opposite of how Japanese people usually conduct themselves. This approach is cemented in the three episodes of “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy”.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is screening on Berlinale

The first episode, “Magic (or Something Less Assuring)” has two best friends, younger Meiko and on the brink of middle age Tsugumi chatting, in the back of a car, about a man the latter met, and her growing fondness of him. The discussion is rather revealing, with the two women speaking quite sincerely about both him and the way they conduct themselves on relationships, including sex. Soon, however, it is revealed that the man Tsugumi was talking about is Meiko’s ex boyfriend,...

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is cinema portmanteau: three short stories focused on three different characters, each a little lovesick and just a little lost. The director is Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, an emerging filmmaker from Japan who seems to have already mastered his craft, and whose work is perfectly at home to such dilemmas. His 2015 film Happy Hour, a five-hour saga, followed the lives of four women in Kobe, one of whom had filed for divorce. Next came Asako I & II in 2018, an adaptation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s novel about a woman who starts seeing a man who looks exactly like the boy she loved when she was younger––a story of doppelgängers, it also showcased his touch for surrealist flourishes.

While fast closing in on auteur status, Hamaguchi’s films continue to hold a kind of literary spirit: Happy Hour the epic; Asako the novella; and now Wheel of Fortune,...

One of the few things that may be keeping Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2015 film Happy Hour from being recognized as one of the great films of the 2010s is its length: At over five hours, its drama of mid-30s women wrestling with their place in life is undoubtedly imposing, regardless of the fact that Hamaguchi’s style is clean and crisp, underscored by shadows of mystery, with none of the arduous challenge usually presented by lengthy art films. Possibly if it had been presented in the format of a multi-episode series, its audience would have easily found it. Hamaguchi’s follow-up, Asako I & II, broke things up cleverly by segmenting its Vertigo-esque story of lovers lost and found into two parts. Now, the Japanese director’s latest, the sly and intriguing portmanteau Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which is premiering in Berlin's main competition, helps the audience by being...