Will Burns: 'Complex Viewing'

In Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s recent anthology film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) chance continually draws attention to the understated complexity of the mundane. Released in the same year as his garlanded Murakami adaption Drive My Car, the film serves as its light-hearted companion piece, further elaborating a style of minimalist camerawork and conversational intimacy that has garnered comparisons with John Cassavetes, Jacques Rivette, and Éric Rohmer. The defining characteristic of Hamaguchi’s films, Emilie Bickerton suggests, is “patience,” as their frequent long takes allow “an event, be it a lunch between friends or a car journey, to play itself out as though it were happening in real time”. In his first commercial feature Happy Hour (2015), a study of the interlocking lives of four women living in Kobe, an extraordinary 317-minute runtime enables the film’s tracing of the relationships—and tensions—between its four protagonists to evolve seamlessly out of its extended attention to their everyday lives. 

Billed in its opening titles as ‘Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Short Stories,’ and shot by a crew of only eight (including the director himself), Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy appropriately condenses this mode of looking. The format’s reduced scale means that the gradual familiarity with the characters on screen that Hamaguchi’s previous films allowed to develop is absent. Instead, their motives and feelings arise indirectly, as if oblique even to themselves.

In ‘Magic (Or Something Less Reassuring),’ the first of the film’s three stories, this emotional obliquity appears in the form of its protagonist’s utter caprice. Over the course of a long taxi ride, Meiko discovers that her best friend Tsugumi is unknowingly dating her ex- boyfriend, Kazuaki. After Tsugumi is dropped off, Meiko gets the taxi to turn around so she can confront him, and potentially rekindle their relationship. Things later come to a head with a chance meeting at a café, when after revealing their prior relationship, Meiko asks Kazuaki to choose between them. At this point, Tsugumi storms out, and the camera suddenly zooms in on Meiko, producing a slight ripple in the film’s epistemology: the scene replays itself, and this time Meiko graciously leaves the couple to their own devices. These incommensurate endings are a form of distancing of the kind German dramatist Bertolt Brecht outlined, encouraging what he called “complex seeing”. For the critic Gilberto Perez, who saw a similar tendency at work in the films of Jean Renoir, this involves “breaking the consistency of a style or tone” a film might otherwise ask us to accept, ensuring “not a single focus but a multiplicity of perspectives”. 

Such moments, then, which may seem to jar with Hamaguchi’s commitment to a form of minimalism, can be seen as part of a contrast repeatedly staged in his films between their reserved style and the love triangles, mistaken identities, and other entanglements which make up their borderline-fabulous plots. Yet this minimalism itself might be seen to signify social intricacy. As Evan Morgan points out, the films’ “MUJI aesthetic of clean lines and soothing creams” carries a distinct “class valence,” one that belongs to the small, tirelessly-networked worlds of arts organisations, theatre workshops, and universities. It is this milieu and its accompanying environs which facilitate their subtle interplay between sparse visuality and narrative complexity. The last scene of ‘Magic’ seems to offer a witty commentary on this dynamic. After leaving the café, Meiko walks out onto a remarkable shot of Shibuya, with a vast building site in the foreground. She then takes a photo with her phone, apparently of this vista—an impression the camera corrects when it then pans upward, revealing blossoms hanging from a tree. The implied contrast between the inevitable high-gloss finish of her photo of the blossoms with the messy world under construction beneath them may allude to what the film intends to show of the world outside its framing of it.

The shot is one of many invocations in Hamaguchi’s work of film’s two parent mediums, photography and theatre, evidence of the director’s interest in how art and life intersect, and one of the surer signs of his indebtedness to the French New Wave. Asako I & II (2018) references the work of the photographer Shigeo Gocho, whose photo of twins—first sighted in an exhibition of his collection Self and Others (1977), then recreated at the film’s end—bookends and foreshadows the uncanny doublings of self that later occur in the film. As is perhaps suggested by Gocho’s title, Asako I & II’s solipsistic focus risks appearing slight (writing for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called it “an odd doppelganger romance of YA earnestness”), but such a judgement would miss the more compelling reflections on illusion and disbelief that underlie its louder narrative gestures. In Drive My Car, a similar meditation on reality and performance takes place within its extensive depiction of rehearsals for a multilingual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, put on by its protagonist, grieving theatre-director Yūsuke. His method for rehearsing the play involves getting his cast to flatly read the text over and over, a way of naturalising the script for the actors, and, for Yūsuke, a working-through of his wife’s death. In a further metatextual twist, this rehearsal method bears a striking resemblance to Hamaguchi’s own (apparently picked up from Renoir). If Hamaguchi’s films had already encouraged a detached method of viewing, in Brechtian terms a “thinking across the flow” of the drama rather than in it, then Drive My Car takes this further, exploring its characters’ own awareness of themselves as actors, before and after the performance.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’s final story, ‘Once Again,’ also runs with this idea. As told through a series of intertitles, a computer virus that spreads private information has driven the world offline (a wry recognition of the film’s interruption by the pandemic). The absence of online interaction seems to have affected everyone’s memory, a situation that both facilitates and ultimately gives the lie to the misrecognition at the story’s core. After a disappointing high school reunion in Sendai, Natsuko apparently encounters a former friend in another chance meeting, the product of an awkward double take on an escalator. However, as we later discover, each has mistaken the other for someone else from their past lives—a disappointment particularly hard on Natsuko, who has mistaken the other woman, Aya, for her first love, Mika. The two seem arrested by the false pretence that brought them together and which has now fallen through, a kind of non- knowledge—or fiction—about each other they now share, that parallels a sense they both have that their own lives have somehow gone missing. They had been acting without knowing it, establishing an intimacy that enables them to consciously play the person they have been mistaken for, which grants them access to their past lives, and some form of closure.

This situation is particularly apparent the second time round, when, before she leaves, Natsuko offers to play the former classmate she has been mistaken for, whose name Aya had been unable to remember. Afterwards, descending the escalator, Aya, as if struck by an epiphany, remembers the name and suddenly runs down and back up the other side to Natsuko, reversing the choreography of their first meeting. The scene serves as a cathartic ending to a film that until now had favoured irresolution, and as a kind of parable. Reality might be more complicated than it appears, or strict fact allows for, and the series of fictions and abbreviations that make up a film might show more than they hide.

William Burns is a PhD student at University College London, researching
modern American poetry and its relationship to the academy. His last piece of film criticism, on Adam Curtis, was published in The Cambridge Humanities Review.