Roda do Destino

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a Japanese anthology film told as three dialogue-driven vignettes, about an unexpected dating mix-up, a malicious seduction, and a misunderstanding between strangers. The three shorts are not love stories, but rather stories about love in the face of coincidence.

Written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the man behind the currently Oscar-nominated Drive My Car, the film evokes drama out of everyday mundanity.

If you had Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy on mute, you wouldn't see anything visually dramatic happening. There's no violence, chases, or explosions. Hamaguchi delivers three dramatically engaging conversations on film, much like a theatrical play. What the dialogue churns out of its characters is remarkable, ranging from the dark, the perverse, and the deceitful. It covers every color of the emotional spectrum, which I suspect was Hamaguchi's goal.

The film brilliantly steers clear of the trappings of anthology films. The three segments are in a perfect balance with each other and all serve the film's overall theme. There was no best segment out of the three, which is quite impressive.

After seeing Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, I thought about the everyday quality of life and how often that is forgotten as being dramatic. What the film explores is in a similar artistic area that the HBO show Mare of Easttown was exploring earlier this year.

Every dramatic moment in life tends to be a person in front of you about to reveal something for better or worse. And life just all seems like luck of the draw. This theme washed over me and I recollected similar moments in my own life afterward.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy captures its idea with impressive precision and also with a whimsical smile on its face. They don't really make films like this anymore and I'm glad someone brought it back. I look forward to seeing Drive My Car now.

This was my second Hamaguchi film of the year (the other being "Drive My Car"), and I'm starting to think I just don't vibe with his style.

To be fair to this movie, I'm not a fan of anthology films, so it was my choice to watch one. And I also watched it assuming that it would be similar in style to "Drive My Car" (it is) and knowing that I wasn't in the mood for a movie like that (it was due back to the library the next day so I felt forced to watch it).

I just get very restless watching Hamaguchi films. They're static and feel very long. Perhaps my favorite movie of 2021 was "Mass," a film that's mostly four characters talking in a single setting for two hours, so it's not like I'm resistant to the kinds of movies Hamaguchi makes. They just don't speak to me for some vague reason, even as I can see that they're objectively very good movies.

Grade: B+

The director showed how to create an amazing story with just a fixed scene and two actors talking to each other with some very good dialogs.

Clearly, this movie polarises viewers. For me, way better than same director's Drive My Car. As good as Burning, American Honey, Stuff and Dough, or Our Time, a few of my benchmarks for 21st century cinema.

The original Japanese title, which translates as Coincidence and Imagination, is much more apt than the clunky English title.

To illustrate his theme, the director writes the most utterly brilliant dialogue, which is sort of like 3D scrabble on steroids.

For all of that, it still needs the wonderful third reel, where the coincidences coalesce into genuine insight and wisdom, of the sort that can reduce you to sudden tears in a darkened cinema.

Hamaguchi-san, you are an ornament, go to the top of the class. I reckon the old masterful deceiver, Bunuel, will be smiling down upon you.

The beauty of this movie lies in its simplicity and class. This is a classy movie with elegant characters, inspired by French cinema: Actors keep talking like there is no tomorrow. If you enjoy dialogue driven drama movies with some offbeat-comedy elements, you will enjoy it.

There are a few minor twists here and there but this is not a thrilling or exciting movie. Not groundbreaking or some kind of masterpiece either.

7.4/10. A very good movie for this genre.