• 偶然と想像 (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy)

5/6/22 (Fri)

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s latest film, released due to pandemic issues around the same time as his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, is an omnibus of three stories with entirely different situations and actors. I actually saw the sections on separate occasions since they were basically unrelated other than the theme of coincidence and were by and large uninteresting.

A woman discovers that her best friend’s new lover is coincidentally her ex; another woman’s interaction with her former French professor (and now a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Award for his first novel) leads to disaster when a typo sends a dodgy e-mail to the wrong person; and a woman mistakes a female stranger for a former classmate and ex-lover.

A static presentation with lots of long scenes filmed in single cuts: this seems designed more as a stage show than a film, not helped by the unimaginative camerawork. The dialogue is unnatural and dithers on irritatingly beyond its sell point; the director could get the same point across with significantly fewer words. The characters are also hard to distinguish from each other. Similarly, there’s no way that the clunky pornographic text that the woman reads from her teacher’s novel in Part 2 could have come from an Akutagawa winner. Hamaguchi is in serious need of a dramaturge. The woman’s recital of such text in the unlikely novel is not credible in any case. and the woman’s recognition of the other woman as a lesbian in Part 3 was just dumb. I found it hard to believe a word of any of this.

The subtitles were problematic. In one case, when the woman’s ex in Part 2 announces that he’s getting married, she says coolly “Omedeto” (おめでとう) , which is not intended as a friendly response. That is translated as a glib “Congrats”, giving the wrong impression entirely. The translator seemed throughout to be more concerned with making the dialogue “interesting” than natural. That’s not Hamaguchi’s fault, of course, but it won’t help viewers’ impression of the film.

A slow methodical rollout of a story through depictions of ordinary life is fine, and Hamaguchi has lots of precedents in Japanese film to draw from. But his script feels artificial. This is not even to the level of television drama.