121 min | NR | October 15, 2021 | Film Movement
Ryusuke Hamaguchi builds three short stories out of coincidence: an ex who resurfaces, a honeytrap that backfires, two strangers who mistake each other for someone from their past. Nothing explodes. Nobody dies. The talking is the action.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is three separate stories that share no characters and no plot. Each one turns on coincidence. A woman discovers her friend’s perfect new boyfriend is her own ex. A married student agrees to seduce and entrap a professor who failed her. Two women meet on an escalator and each becomes convinced the other is someone she once knew. The film is about the gap between what people plan to say and what actually comes out of their mouths.
Kotone Furukawa plays Meiko in the first story with a stillness that hides calculation. She listens to her friend Tsugumi describe a flawless date and you watch her recognize the man being described before she says a word. Katsuki Mori plays Nao in the second story as a woman who reads an explicit passage aloud to Professor Segawa as bait and begins to mean it. Kiyohiko Shibukawa plays Segawa with a careful politeness that cracks exactly once and reseals just as fast. In the third story Fusako Urabe plays Natsuko, who commits to a stranger’s mistaken identity out of kindness rather than deceit. Every performance lives in the pause before the line, not the line itself.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi writes and directs all three parts, and his method shows in every scene. He holds the camera still and lets two people talk for minutes at a stretch. The cuts arrive on logic rather than rhythm, and he favors the plain two-shot over the reaction close-up. He deploys one abrupt zoom in the second story to mark the moment a scheme turns real, and the move lands because he has earned it with stillness everywhere else. A delicate recurring piano motif threads the three stories together without announcing a theme.
The anthology form usually buries its weak segment behind the strong ones. Here all three hold their weight. Each story builds to a single conversation where a character says the true thing and bends the outcome. Hamaguchi trusts dialogue to carry suspense, and he is right to trust it. The result is a film about how a whole life pivots on one sentence, spoken or swallowed.