Author: Hxh42
2021 is the big year for Japanese art films. Or to be more specific, it's the japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi' big year. From the beginning of the year, "Chance and Imagination" won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
"Chance and Imagination"
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
In the middle of the year, "Driving My Car" won the best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's two works within a year were not only shortlisted for the main competition units of the three major European film festivals, but also won awards at the level of awards. What kind of works will he bring to us in the future?
Although Ryusuke Hamaguchi has been in the film for more than a decade since his first official feature film "Passion" in 2008.
Seniority is by no means shallow, but before this year's European film festival hit, many people's impressions of Ryusuke Hamaguchi came mainly from two works: "Happy Hour" in 2015 and "Night and Day" in 2018. Fans and friends in Beijing must know that these two works are resident films in the daily film list of the China Film Archive. The five-hour-long "Happy Hour" shined at that year's Locarno Film Festival, breaking records for four of the non-professional actresses to win the best actress at the same time, and at the same time, it was also shortlisted for the annual top ten of the Japanese magazine "Movie Shunbao", which was praised and paid attention by the media and general audiences.
The situation of "Night and Day" is not ideal: not only after screening at the Cannes Film Festival, it received a lot of incomprehension and extreme criticism of "why this dog-blood romance drama can enter the main competition in Cannes", but also because the male and female protagonists of this film (Higashi Ide Masada and Tang Tian Mijia) "fake drama really do" style cheating love affair and encountered more criticism and criticism.
So what kind of movie is Chance and Imagination? What's special about this film is that it's not a complete feature film, but a combination of three short films. The stories of these three short films are not related to each other, and only the similarity of the themes ("chance and imagination") constitutes the entire film, which is commonly known as the "short platter film" and "highlight film".
As the name suggests, almost all three stories have a "fortuitous" coincidence that brings the characters together or separates, triggering an initial dramatic conflict that slowly unfolds. At the same time, there are blanks and suspense in these stories that guide the audience to "imagine". All three stories feature female protagonists, continuing the consistent theme of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films.
Because each story is shorter, they list fewer elements than the average film, weave characters and plots more limited, and are therefore more concise and beautiful; at the same time, the three stories also provide three different genre directions in order to carry a richer imagination, and this relaxed and free way of creation makes "Chance and Imagination" more diverse.
The first story of Chance and Imagination is called Magic (less real than magic).
The story begins with a working photography team, and our heroine, a model, ends the shoot with another female member of the camera crew in a taxi. During the long small talk between the two, we learned that the female member had just met a man she thought she had a crush on, so she couldn't suppress her excitement and shared it with our heroine.
When she got out of the car, the heroine asked the taxi driver to turn around and go to an office building to find her ex-boyfriend, who turned out to be the man the two were talking about. This is the coincidental, dramatic opening of the film, and the opening of the whole film.
Magic (less real than magic) ends with a hong-chang-so-style visual and narrative deception, the illusion and imagination of what the title calls "less real than magic." Then we come to the second story of Chance and Imagination: The Open Door.
The title, the title and the central plot of the film, leads to the idea that in order to prevent the possibility of sexual harassment, the professor's office door is always open to prove the innocence of the people inside. The heroine promises to avenge her young lover, so she finds the professor who fired her lover, who has just published a novel and won the Wasagawa Prize, the most important literary award in Japan.
She tried to seduce the professor, then recorded evidence of the professor's assault on her and exposed it to the media, leaving him discredited. But things didn't go the way she had envisioned...
The first story begins with a coincidence, while Open Doors ends with a coincidence, except that the coincidence does not connect with a hidden love triangle; on the contrary, it destroys the fate of the characters and breaks them apart from each other.
"Again", the third and final story of "Chance and Imagination", takes place in the context of futuristic science fiction: a virus that returns the world's communications to the original mail era, and many people who previously knew each other lost contact with each other.
However, for this story, this "science fiction" background is more of a premise setting to achieve a certain state between characters, if not an explicit metaphor or allegory, than the key to the plot of the story. The story also begins with a coincidence: the heroine meets a familiar old classmate on the road and then goes home with her to reminisce about the past – it turns out that this person is the person she used to like. But the identity of this "classmate" is more complicated than she had imagined...
"Again" has the warmest and most happy ending of the three stories. The two women embraced each other on the overpass, opened their hearts, and reconciled with each other and their past selves.
This story just happens to echo the current era of the epidemic when people are indifferent and everyone is at risk, which is also a kind of "accident". In every way, Chance and Imagination is a reflection and cautionary fable written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi for our time.