An Oscar Winner Made Two Movies In 2021 - And One Of Them Hit Streaming Today
This is for the Editorial Fellowship. Ryusuke Hamaguchi won the Oscar for Best International Feature for his remarkable three-hour drama Drive My Car. But he also made another movie in 2021 that deserves your attention –– and as of today, it's streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy delights in the written word. It’s one of the most writerly films in recent memory, almost exclusively hinging on rich, layered dialogue delivered by subtle, passionate performers. Almost every one of its scenes is a conversation between two actors with no supporting players or extras in sight.
The film quickly settles into a visual identity that’s decidedly unflashy and unmemorable, committing to monochromatic color palettes and stationary camera setups that are so unnoticeable that you feel like you’re watching a play or listening to an audio drama. There are, however, a few pointed counterexamples to its simple visual style, as Hamaguchi establishes his soothing patterns to maximize the effect of breaking them: a disorienting zoom shakes us from an imaginary scenario into the real world, and performers occasionally look straight down the barrel of the camera lens to highlight the importance of key lines.
The film is broken into three distinct segments, dedicating around 40 minutes to each chapter. The first, "Magic (or Something Less Assuring)," focuses on a love triangle between a woman (Kotone Furukawa), her ex-boyfriend (Ayumu Nakajima), and his new girlfriend (Hyunri), who happens to be best friends with the first girlfriend but has no knowledge of that previous relationship. The second segment, “Door Wide Open,” follows a woman (Katsuki Mori) as she attempts to seduce a professor (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) and destroy his career on behalf of her young lover (Shouma Kai), to whom the professor gave a poor grade. The final segment, “Once Again,” sees two old friends (Fusako Urabe and Aoba Kawai) reconnect after a high school reunion, only to discover that their past is not what they assumed.
All three of the segments hinge on a moment of sheer coincidence –– one involving meeting the right person at the wrong time, one due to unforced human error, and the last landing somewhere in between. Though the nature of these coincidences are distinct, they all highlight how singular moments –– and how we respond to them –– have the power to completely transform the outcome of our lives in the blink of an eye.
What’s striking about the film isn’t these moments of coincidence, though –– it’s the thoughtful analysis that springs from characters placed in bizarre situations. The ex-lovers in the first segment spend the majority of their time diving into a perplexing autopsy of their failed romance, verbosely pondering how the dynamics of their past relationship continues to inform their present. The second chapter sees total strangers find genuine emotional connection mere minutes after one of them tries to seductively exploit the other –– they externally process how the preceding tense moment made them feel. The characters end up tenderly affirming strengths in each other that they can’t see in themselves, and they voice desires that they don’t realize they possess until they start articulating them. And the third segment mixes the strengths of the first two, as its characters relitigate past relationships in order to find peace for the future.
These conversational scenes make up the vast majority of the film, and they’re verbally and thematically quite stunning. The characters’ memories, regrets, impulses, and reflections are richly layered in their contradictions and emotional tones thanks to Hamaguchi’s beautiful dialogue, which possesses an undeniably poetic quality despite the limitations of translation. I was most transfixed by the middle segment in the professor’s office. The professor is a writer, which gives the filmmaker an opportunity to interrogate the creative process. The writer delivers line after line of fascinating ruminations on what it means to tell a story: how structure grabs the audience’s attention, how personal weaknesses can transform into artistic strengths, and how, at a certain point, the words take on a life of their own, moving in directions outside of your comfort and control.
Hamaguchi is a patient filmmaker who’s unafraid to wait a while to make his points, filling conversations with a multitude of details that many may deem unnecessary. But in addition to the craftsmanship of his sentence constructions, the volume of those details has a transformative effect on the later moments when characters like the professor bluntly state their theses and philosophies. We’ve danced around the point and gotten to know the characters in the process, and the eventual revelation of the vulnerable truth is immensely cathartic. The buildups enhance the payoff of the climaxes, and the climaxes retroactively justify the buildups. It’s a creative choice that makes the film somewhat frustrating to watch as it unfolds, but it’s tremendously satisfying by the time it ends.
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