There are few distances in the world greater than the space occupied by all the words that go unsaid between two people.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” though, has a way of making this chasm of the unmentioned possess an uncommon intimacy.
Hamaguchi’s precursor to his worldwide breakthrough of “Drive My Car,” “Wheel” teeters on a precipice of change in the director’s career. With its format of three independent stories, each depicting different relationships; platonic, romantic, and otherwise, the film has a momentum of recurrent passage that presses it along. Change; or perish to time.
Similar to “Drive My Car,” the stakes of “Wheel” rest entirely in dialogue; making communication itself the force of all progression. Hamaguchi traps…