Wheel of
Fortune and Fantasy
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021
#8,
2021 Skandies
Hunh! So, right on the heels of The French Dispatch, we have another anthology of three short films. Though they are three of the least cinematic films I can recall seeing; all three revolve around conversations, to the point that even though intellectually I knew I was in my house looking at a screen, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was at a theater watching a stage play. The title card had billed the movie as a collection of short stories by one Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who I took to be a Japanese author whose work some filmmaker had decided to adapt, the way that Short Cuts drew upon the short stories of Raymond Carver. So if the three short films were all talk, I figured, it’s because they weren’t originally composed for a visual medium. Except then it turned out that Ryusuke Hamaguchi was the filmmaker, so that theory was a bust. Anyway—while these three films have virtually none of the style of the Wes Anderson trio, I found the stories a bit more interesting, so I’d place the two anthologies about on par. (Though there is also a long monologue in the second chapter of Wheel, in which a character is reading a smutty passage from a book aloud, that made it pretty obvious how the “goddammit, Japan” meme got started.)
A Hero
Asghar Farhadi, 2021
#7, 2021 Skandies
If you decide to watch this movie, be very careful when you look it up. The English title of this movie is A Hero. Do not get An Hero—that one’s really depressing.
Not that this is much cheerier. It has a fair amount in common with the writer/director’s earlier film, A Separation: once again we’re exploring the Iranian justice system, and once again we have a plot in which someone is largely truthful, but the gap between “largely” and “completely” ends up doing a lot of damage. Our protagonist, Rahim, borrowed some money from a loan shark, but it turns out that hand-painted signs are not in much demand these days, so his business went under. His brother-in-law paid off the loan, but when Rahim couldn’t pay back the brother-in-law—or, now, ex-brother-in-law, since Rahim’s wife has divorced him—he is sent to debtors’ prison. When his new lover finds a handbag full of gold coins, it seems as though there might be some light at the end of the tunnel: the coins are worth half the amount owed. The next time he has a two-day leave from prison, Rahim takes the coins to a gold dealer to sell them, but broken equipment and a dropping exchange rate make him hold off. Then his sister, with whom he is staying, discovers the coins; at first, seeing the broken handbag strap, she fears he resorted to purse-snatching, but when he swears he’s not a thief, she urges him to try to find the handbag’s owner. Conscience gets the better of him, and he puts up some ads, with the prison phone as his contact number. A woman calls up and visits Rahim’s sister’s house to pick it up, and that would be that—except the prison wardens think this would make for good publicity and want to contact the media. Rahim is skittish: this is not a society in which it would be wise to let his secret relationship come to light. Never mind that, the warden says—just say you found the bag yourself! Soon, as the title suggests, Rahim is hailed as a hero: a prisoner whose lucky find could have set him free, but who still did the right thing and returned the money! And this is basically what happened… but the story isn’t airtight. A charity raises money on Rahim’s behalf—the donations add up to only a quarter of what he owes, but the brother-in-law finds himself under immense pressure to accept them as a full settlement. But he wonders, if Rahim found the handbag on the first day of his leave, as he says, why did he text a week earlier to say that he’d be able to pay back half the amount? Others wonder why the woman who claimed the purse hasn’t been on the TV reports—she seems to have vanished into thin air, and didn’t leave a name or number. Was the purse really hers? For that matter, was there even a purse? This story is starting to sound like it was all made up. Hoax! Fake news!!
Our species has problems both with excessive credulity and excessive skepticism. The former allows online scammers to rake in tens of billions of dollars each year from the U.S. alone. Hello, I am a Microsoft technician and we have detected a virus on your computer, so please purchase thousands of dollars’ worth of gift cards to pay for our antivirus software! Hello, this is Brad Pitt, and I’m in love with you, but I can only keep sending you videos saying so if you keep sending bitcoins to stay in my online fan club! The scale of the damage is exponentially greater when the gullibility extends to the world of politics—when people select governments on the basis of ludicrous stories that they accept without question. Schools are providing litterboxes to students who identify as furries! Hillary Clinton has ordered thirty thousand guillotines to kill evangelical Christians! When Midwesterners’ pets go missing, immigrants are to blame! I will end the war in Ukraine and bring prices back down to 2020 levels on day one! But the flip side of that coin might pose an even bigger problem: some are so paranoid about being taken in that they take everything as a hoax. This means that as global weather patterns are thrown into chaos, we see a mule-headed refusal to accept the validity of climate science. In the aftermath of a pandemic we see fear-mongering about vaccines. At the extremes we even see people seriously rejecting the spheroidal nature of the Earth. The moon landing was faked! The terrified kids in school shooting footage are all crisis actors! But it’s not just these sorts of crackpots doubting Rahim’s story out there on the intertubes. These days I rarely happen upon a public post of a personal anecdote in which the comments aren’t full of people trotting out the same tired bits of formulaic sarcasm. “And then everybody clapped.” “His name? Albert Einstein.” Yes, there is a lot of bullshit online, but it has made some people so wary about falling for any of it that their reflexive stance is that nothing remarkable has ever happened to anybody ever. And Rahim finds that there are enough of these sorts of people that any part of his story that raises any questions, anything that isn’t thoroughly documented and corroborated, means that a lot of people decide that the whole thing can be safely dismissed as another one for the “oh, yeah, that happened” file.
Anyway, the references in the subtitles to “tomans” whenever money is discussed got me wondering about the value of these debts, since I had thought Iran’s currency was the rial. Apparently the country redenominated recently. From what I can tell, Rahim’s debt circa 2021 would be a bit less than $40,000 in U.S. dollars according to the official exchange rate, but at the rate actually used at the time, it was actually around $5500. Inflation in Iran in the intervening years has pushed the value to $1200 at the end of 2025. A screening of this movie to seventy-five people at my local theater would have raised enough money to get him out of jail! And that’s if no one bought popcorn!
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