Gûzen to sôzô (2021)'s activity

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy presents three thematically-linked stories, and it's those links, along with the title, that give his mundane slice-of-life tales a sense that great forces - psychological and cosmic - are at work in our lives, forces that take us into the territory of poetics. In each story, two things: A web of coincidence creates a chance encounter that one character describes as Dramatic Meeting. And characters will go in with one intention and end up doing something else with greater conviction. If the film is about regret, it's largely about overcoming that regret and moving on. Where there is ambiguity, it's the sort of every-day ambiguity that comes from not knowing another person (or even oneself) fully, and ultimately it's in the service of finding some grace in the world, and therefore, some poignancy for the audience. Each story is better than the last, and though each is small, private, and essentially just a conversation or series of conversations, each feels momentous in its own way. Unadorned cinema at its best.