Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

  Like his later Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy ripples with emotional insights centered on a feminine sensibility. The film presents three Hamaguchi short stories about lost love and the yearning to recapture a past. The boyish women at the center of the two framing stories anticipate the Drive film’s mute and driver.

Again an intimacy develops in a close car. “Magic or Something Less Assuring” grows out of two women’s increasingly intimate conversation in a taxi. The beautiful Tsugami confides in the boyish Meiko her new ardor for a stranger, Kazuaki. Realizing Kazuaki is her own ex-lover, Meiko confronts him in his office at night, whether to win him back or to torment him. The episode has two endings, providing alternative responses by Meiko. The “Magic” refers to Tsugami’s experience with the man; the “something less assuring” to Meiko’s ambiguous intervention.    

Initially Meiko is a model performing in a fashion shoot. At the end she shoots a photo of an urban construction scene, machines reaching above the foliage. That movement suggests the character’s tension over her own agency.     

In “Door Wide Open” a woebegone elderly writer/professor Segawa is visited by a beautiful ex-student, the married mother, Nao. Her young lover coerces her into luring Sagawa into “a honey trap” to avenge the professor’s thwarting of the young man’s career. 

The title echoes the professor’s care to avoid a compromising situation. In the event, however, the professor is seduced by his own words when the woman reads to him an erotic passage from his Akatagawa Prize fiction. (The allusion is to the celebrated Ryunusuke Akatagawa, two of whose short stories Kurosawa turned into the classic Rashomon.)

The seduction attempt backfires when the woman is herself deeply moved by the professor’s succumbing to her voice. They restrict their romance to agreeing to share the recording of the passage, with a mutual promise of a remote erotic connection through it.

But a misdirected email ends the professor’s career and the woman’s marriage. A chance meeting at the end suggests her avenging reunion with the young lover who initiated her visit. However carefully we leave our doors open, our impulses may still rule. 

In “Once Again” two women passing on an escalator mistake each other for intriguing characters from their high school past. Despite their errors they find a spark in each other. Each assumes the role the other hoped to meet, enabling their respective reconciliations and forming a close emotional bond in the process. 

All three stories show women negotiating their compelling drives through conventional strictures. They confirm Hamaguchi’s mastery of nuance in character revelation.