Brief Encounters
The Gentle Magic of Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s 'Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy'
I used to take the train. I’d step out of my house, crunch over the gravel driveway into the cul-de-sac and head down the street, keeping my head down and music loud in my earphones as kids on rollerblades sliced by, basketballs bounced around and over my head, and families barbecued on their patios. It was a thirty minute walk to Gold Line station at the far end of the Citrus College campus, and sometimes I’d take the 281 to avoid it. But that was unreliable, so usually I’d just walk. I’d cut through Citrus with my backpack, on my way to work or wherever, and blend in with the students. I was four or five years older than most of them, but didn’t look it.
The APU/Citrus station is the gold line’s eastern terminus, so there’s always a train waiting. I’d arrive, board, and then be off, leaving my horrible little town behind, being propelled gently, ceaselessly into the city. If you live in Los Angeles long enough, you start to meet people. And once you start taking public transit, you see them. I ran into friends, acquaintances, exes, crushes, coworkers current and former. I got to know the drivers of certain bus routes, so I’d see them too. A friend ran into their friend at a Bikini Kill show at the Palladium. A few months later I saw them waiting for the Red Line at Hollywood and Western. We rode the train to Union Station together. Years ago I was working at a coffee shop in Sierra Madre. One day I ate lunch with a customer I’d never really talked to, and he told me all sorts of deranged stories from his pre-marital sexual past. I was fired shortly after that for something unrelated. We didn’t see each other for years, until I crossed paths with him at the foot of the escalator at the Memorial Park station in Pasadena. We ended up talking for hours that night on a bench in the park.
An hour and a half into Japanese writer-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s new film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, I grew bored. And despite myself. The conceit of the film is charming, and several bits of dialogue (dialogue is almost all that’s there) are stirring. The film is triptych of unconnected stories based on the theme of coincidence. Two friends share a cab, and one friend discovers that the other’s story of a passionate one-night affair is about her own ex-boyfriend. Young lovers in school devise a harebrained plot to entrap a professor in a sex scandal. It blows up in everyone’s faces, but not in the way any of them expected. Two women meet in passing on the weekend of a girls’ school reunion. They were in love the way teenagers fall in love, but they’ve drifted apart, and then, one woman actually isn’t who she says she is. Despite that, they form a touching bond.
These stories, called in order “Magic (or something less assuring),” “Door Wide Open,” and “Once Again” are engaging enough, but only enough. They typically begin with a seemingly unrelated microscene (a photoshoot on the street in “Magic,” and a fired employee groveling for his job back in “Door Wide Open”), and continue into the meat of the action. But they remain elliptical, even evasive. Hamaguchi’s camera, guided by newcomer DP Yukiko Iioka, prefers to remain still, concentrating on drably, yet convincingly decorated offices and living rooms. The characters are placed nicely within the mise-en-scene, but they occupy it with little energy, delivering florid and even baroquely overwritten monologues with all the passion of someone reciting a grocery list. The performances do feel deliberately tempered in order to contrast and heighten the writing, but is this writing that should be heightened?
“I could sense that I touched something deep in him,” one character says to another, less than two minutes into a conversation in story one, “and I felt he touched me deep within too.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, beautifully phrased, but give me a break. I believe in conversational magic, and yes, some things less assuring too—the power of speaking, listening, and being heard to move you to deep states: life-affirming empathy, primal recognition, even violence and unshakeable disquiet. But you don’t get there over the course of ten minutes. Hamaguchi strikes me as having the temperament of the impatient lover—desperate for climax and profound intimacy, but unwilling to do the work it takes to earn it. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is full of arresting lines. “We caressed each other as we talked.” “You forced me to speak before I knew my feelings, so the words came out wrong.” But rather than enhancing their allure, the shortened runtime on each story and the soft-pedaled performances make the dialogue feel twee in its wistful unbelievability, and chintzy, grating it against the nerves.
And then the film arrives at “Once Again.” Hamaguchi’s camera picks up and moves. It goes in and out of doors, taking in verdant spring foliage, the sound of a rushing breeze, and dappled light on city sidewalks. That light pervades the whole story, bringing with it a warmth and kinetic energy not felt in stories one and two. Natsuko (Fusako Urabe) has returned to her hometown to attend a class reunion but is disappointed to not encounter an old flame from her past there. But the next day she does encounter her, not in a smoky, jazz-filled, romantically lit bar like we’re accustomed to seeing scenes like this take place, but in broad daylight, on an escalator. In the film’s most compelling visual metaphor, Natsuko descends, while on the other track, Aya (Aoba Kawai, the star of Hamaguchi’s first feature, Passion, and Wheel’s standout actress) ascends. The two recognize each other, visibly brim with emotion, and scurry onto the opposite tracks once they reach the end of their own. Once they finally meet at the top, even though Aya isn’t who Natsuko thinks she is, the two women will have begun to forge a bond that transforms both of their lives, and the experience of the viewer watching the film.
I was transported by the escalator scene, back to the days where you could step out of your house, onto a bus, and into a bittersweet world of missed connections and serendipitous encounters. Whatever was left of spontaneity and the thrill of chance that social media reduced to embers has been stomped out by the pandemic. Over the course of that long first year, where we were all afraid to even go into grocery stores, I would walk over to the train station at night. Metro never stopped its service, and some never stopped taking it. I did, but I couldn’t get the world it brought me to out of my mind. Hamaguchi filmed stories one and two of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy pre-pandemic. “Once Again,” which takes place in an alternate present where a rampant computer virus has led humanity to voluntarily give up on internet technology, was filmed after the pandemic began. The vitality that courses through that story might be Hamaguchi’s yearning to return to that world of easy exchanges, to the romance of city living. It was my yearning that connected me to the story, and allowed me to appreciate Hamaguchi’s slow and tender touches throughout the rest of the film. It may be in many moments an unbelievable world that Hamaguchi has created, but it’s one I wouldn’t mind returning to.
