The Thinking Machine #80

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

The first episode of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) contains a 15-and-a-half-minute dialogue scene in an office that builds to an extraordinary moment: a cut between two unusual images. What is the choreographed mise en scène of bodily displacements and gestures that leads us to this moment – and how does Hamaguchi ultimately release the emotional tension?