Chance Communications and Sex in the Middle

What a year for writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Admittedly, this is only the second picture of his, to go along with Oscar-darling "Drive My Car" (2021), that I've seen thus far, but they thematically compliment each other exceptionally well. In the other movie, he combined in adaptation two or three short stories from a collection by Haruki Murakami, as well as performances of plays by Samuel Beckett and Anton Chekhov, into a three-hours-long integrated whole. Viewing it, for me at least, was something of an exercise in disentangling its connected parts. The opposite effort seems to be required for "Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy," where three stories are separated into an anthology, and the job is to thematically reconstitute the whole from the disconnected parts.

I almost rate this as highly as the other movie, but I consider the first narrative too weak by comparison to the two that follow, as I would, too, to the extraordinary, sexually-engineered narratology of the pre-credits, 40-some-minutes opening of "Drive My Car." The subject matter of the first episode, "Magic (or Something Less Assuring)," is congruent with the other narratives, but perhaps it's just the pontificating on love from immature yuppies that irritated me. Of course, two of them, at least, are in the fashion industry. It's also laughable almost to the point of self-parody to feature lengthy conversations that revolve around reporting on other conversations. As well, there's a bit of conspicuous product placement in beginning and ending the episode with photography by way of Apple-branded products, which, by contrast, is in opposition to the anti-computerized communication throughline in the movie thereafter.

Otherwise, all three episodes revolve around shared themes--and ones that they further share with those of "Drive My Car." There's coincidence, irony, memory, mistaken identity, doubled meanings, and a focus on communication and lack thereof or miscommunication. Even the English-language title, "Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy," which oddly also reminds of the title of an American TV game show, isn't quite a literal translation, for which I'm told "Change and Imagination" would be more accurate. Then, again, this is a movie where the writer-character is a French professor who wrote an erotic book in Japanese, as if the only meaning of "French" is the nationality's peculiar association in the popular imagination with sex.

In "Magic," there's the play on dramatic irony and its opposite, with characters knowing more than we do and, then, we knowing more than other characters do--all based on the information that each of them reveals to and withholds from each other. Episode two, "Door Wide Open," also plays upon dramatic irony, as well as the irony of the professor's "open door" policy that's meant to protect him from the misinterpretation of impropriety, but which is ultimately undermined by another bit of miscommunication in the mixing up of similar names. It also features perhaps the most erotic story told only in words since that famous scene in "Persona" (1966), and it's done via what wouldn't even require a Freudian to figure out is some tongue-in-cheek (or what-have-you-in-cheek) fun with castration anxiety.

Frankly, that scene can't be topped, but the final episode, "Once Again," is appreciable nonetheless as the most light-hearted of the anthology, involving a case of mistaken identity that turns into each character knowingly enacting the part of the character they're mistaken for. There's also some business with the meaning of names, as there is in "Dive My Car," which are in this case also fittingly, regardless of one's opinion on the progressive politics of it, gender-fluid. Good use of an escalator, too, which reflects the circling back of the cab in the first episode and also aligns with the erotic middle part about a book that includes an erotic middle part, too, as a hook for the reader, or at least for a certain kind of reader--you know who you are--to keep reading. Well, it worked.