Wheel of For­tune and Fantasy

Billed in the open­ing titles as ​“Short Sto­ries by Ryū­suke Ham­aguchi”, this packs three dif­fer­ent episodes into its two hour run­time, loose­ly con­nect­ed by the inter­ac­tion of chance on human emo­tions. The usu­al caveat, that
such port­man­teau affairs are rarely as sat­is­fy­ing as a sin­gle ful­ly-devel­oped nar­ra­tive, applies here, espe­cial­ly in com­par­i­son to the writer/director’s mar­vel­lous Dri­ve My Car.

Here though qual­i­ty con­trol is pleas­ing­ly high, and the third of the trio might actu­al­ly be one of the high­lights of the entire Ham­aguchi fil­mog­ra­phy. Clas­si­cal solo piano from Schumann’s ​‘Scenes of Child­hood’ estab­lish­es a mood of wist­ful rever­ie as the open­ing sto­ry Mag­ic (or Some­thing Less Assur­ing) intro­duces us to a bob-haired mod­el pos­ing by a Tokyo road­side, before tak­ing in a good girly chat with her best friend/​assistant.

Turns out, how­ev­er, the for­mer is hid­ing the fact that she and her pal’s poten­tial new boyfriend have his­to­ry togeth­er, and maybe their split isn’t as final as he’d been sug­gest­ing. Pouty and capri­cious, this gal is exas­per­at­ing­ly unpre­dictable, even to her­self. Ham­aguchi is in no hur­ry to con­demn, instead his cam­era is a cool observ­er, reg­is­ter­ing how it’s tak­en an unex­pect­ed coin­ci­dence to bring mat­ters to a heady con­fronta­tion with the guy.

Still, the clos­ing image of the mas­sive build­ing site that is down­town Shibuya sug­gests these tan­gled lives may yet be a work in progress after all. It’s a piquant, intrigu­ing begin­ning, if not exact­ly a slam-dunk, and the sec­ond seg­ment con­tin­ues in a sim­i­lar absorb­ing, if not quite over­whelm­ing vein.

Here Door Wide Open refers to a uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor who receives an unex­pect­ed vis­it from a mature for­mer female stu­dent, sur­rep­ti­tious­ly schem­ing with a dis­grun­tled fel­low class­mate (whose grad­u­a­tion the prof had blocked) to entrap him.

His office door clos­es, albeit briefly, as her plan springs into action, though the aca­d­e­m­ic proves sur­pris­ing­ly insight­ful that her sex­u­al forth­right­ness sug­gest a per­son­al lib­er­a­tion at odds with Japan’s con­ser­v­a­tive social mores. A seem­ing­ly cru­el sub­se­quent rever­sal notwith­stand­ing, Hamaguchi’s sym­pa­thies for anoth­er con­trary fem­i­nine out­sider prove even more evi­dent here, a theme fol­lowed through to the film’s clos­ing – and best – sec­tion, Any Day Now.

The dystopi­an sci-fi set-up intro­duces us to world where a hay­wire email virus has sent every­one back to snail-mail and land­lines, yet what we get is a cap­ti­vat­ing bijou encounter, where two thir­ty-some­thing women think they recog­nise each oth­er from high school days. A fate­ful glide-by on an esca­la­tor at Sendai sta­tion spurs an after­noon of mem­o­ries and rev­e­la­tions, expos­ing dis­ap­point­ment and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty – as events take on the char­ac­ter of role-play­ing in a self-described ​“dra­mat­ic meeting”.

It’s a quin­tes­sen­tial exam­ple of Hamaguchi’s strik­ing skill at shap­ing a momen­tary con­struct which some­how allows pierc­ing­ly truth­ful inti­ma­cy to emerge, beau­ti­ful­ly per­formed by Fusako Urabe and Aoba Kawai, and leav­ing us to pon­der the char­ac­ters’ sub­se­quent path­ways as the film’s explo­sion of feel­ing lingers in our imag­i­na­tion. Def­i­nite­ly peak Ham­aguchi, and it makes this a must-see.

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