Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which won the grand jury prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, is a three-part anthology in which its stories are linked by themes implied in the segment titles: Each of the three female protagonists’ lives are changed by chance and all three stories ask “what if” questions that stimulate the imagination, with one even venturing into sci-fi.
The segments are also imbued with an eroticism at once playful and serious, tied to the women’s emotional cores. Throughout the film, German composer Robert Schumann’s “Traumerei” (“Dreaming"), with its sweet simplicity and merry-go-round-like repetitions, evokes the “wheel” of the English title.
The stories, written by Hamaguchi, thus have a formal unity, while reflecting the unruly nature of life, with its coincidences and sudden changes of heart and luck that seem to defy reason. They solidify his reputation as a director of rare talent and ambition, though both qualities were already apparent in his 2015 breakthrough “Happy Hour,” a five-hour drama that also experimented with form and narrative.