Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY ***
IDEA: A triptych of episodes focusing on the impact of free will, coincidence, and social mores on the lives of different women.
BLURB: Social interchange is a mercurial and adventitious things in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a structurally sneaky comedy of manners, errors, and fateful encounters. Each of its three chapters - stark, sometimes time-hopping chamber plays that suggest life distilled to miniatures - revolves around the strange alchemy of chance and desire, alighting on minor inflection points that have the potential to birth new possibilities, whether fortuitous or otherwise. Often recalling Hong Sang-soo’s tricksy relationship games, Hamaguchi frequently films dialogue between characters in long, static two-shots, his camera like an X-ray picking up conversational tensions, mood shifts, and granular mutations in real-time. And like another master auteur, Abbas Kiarostami, he slyly manipulates character dynamics to create a series of enigmatic displacements that consistently reshape the nature of the relationships we’re witnessing. Sunny demeanors conceal romantic frustration and cunning; malicious intent dissolves into a reciprocal voicing of desire; old friends become strangers, and vice-versa. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy evolves too, growing funnier and richer as the addition of its chapters generates new semiotic connections. What is intriguing if for a while a bit airless comes to a satisfying payoff in the final third, when Hamaguchi turns the game on us, combining prior textual knowledge, accumulated expectations, and deceptive new signifiers to upend our perception of the characters in tandem with their own confounded perceptions of each other. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy steadily compiles such revelatory discoveries, and, to borrow from one of its chapter headings, leaves the door wide open for more.
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