Family Romance, LLC

Werner Herzog: Family Romance, LLC. Mahiro Tanimoto (Mahiro) and Yuichi Ishii as himself.

Werner Herzog: Family Romance, LLC. Yuika Koide as Ishii's infant child and Yuichi Ishii as himself.

Family Romance, LLC. A Film by Werner Herzog.
    US/JP © 2019. Skellig Rock, Inc. P: Roc Morin.
    D+SC: Werner Herzog. Camera: Werner Herzog. Drone footage: Simon Herzog. Cost: Ruth Tzipora. M: Ernst Reijseger. S: Mark A. Mangini. ED: Sean Scannell.
    C: Yuichi Ishii (himself), Mahiro Tanimoto (Mahiro), Miki Fujimaki (Mahiro's mother), Takashi Nakatani (father of the bride / lottery official), Kumi Manda (mother of the bride), Yuka Watanabe (the bride), Jin Kuroinu (Ishii's friend), Airi Coats (Airi, Mahiro's little friend), Shun Ishigaki (pantomine), Tatsuaki Hojo (bullet train official), Tetsuro Mori (bullet train employee), Ryoko Sugimachi (lottery winner), Airi Asoh (woman at the Fox Shrine), Yuki Wakabayashi (Hedgehog Café), Umetani Hideyasu (Robot Hotel manager), Iwamoto Eisuke (funeral home manager), Take Nakamura (oracle), Yuika Koide (Ishii's infant child), Sumire Nagai (idol paparazzi), Nihonbashi Ryomankai Group (swordfighters), Kiju Kitamura (musician with swordfighters).
    Special thanks: Family Romance, Lec Co. Ltd. Petit Wedding, Henn-na Robot Hotel Asakusabashi, Yasuragi Warabi Funeral Home, Hagu Hedgehog Café, Tokyo Location Box, Naoki Kitaya, Takayuki Aoki Office Design, The Marmoset Agency, Reiko Yamashita Cast Management, Yumi Koide, Charleigh Rakthay, Natsuho Tanaka, Airi Tanimoto, Seiko Coats, Grishma Rao, Robert Piaskowsi, Joanna Broniec.
    Loc: Tokyo.
    90 min
    Festival premiere: 18 May 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
    Corona lockdown viewings.
    Viewed from the MUBI platform with English subtitles by Hiventy at a forest retreat in Punkaharju on a tv screen, 4 July 2020.

MUBI: Synopsis

"Love is a business at Family Romance, a company that rents human stand-ins for any occasion. Founder Yuichi Ishii helps make his clients’ dreams come true. But when the mother of 12-year-old Mahiro hires Ishii to impersonate her missing father, the line between acting and reality threatens to blur."

MUBI: Our take

"MUBI is ecstatic to take you on a surreal new adventure with indefatigable globetrotting auteur, Werner Herzog. Filmed guerrilla-style in Japan, Herzog’s unique dramatization of the real phenomenon of renting family members and social stand-ins explores the uncanny essence of human relationships."

AA: Werner Herzog is at his best in Family Romance, LLC. As the director states, it is a study in existential solitude – a solitude that is increasing in our century of smartphones, internet and the social media. This film could be satirical, but instead it is tender and lyrical. It could be a farce of embarrassments, but instead it is a display of dignity.

Family Romance is a real company, and Yuichi Ishii is its real director, but all the other characters in the film are fictional, and all events are enactments.

Ishii himself plays the long-lost father of Mahiro, a 12-year girl, so well that a true loving bond emerges not only between them but with the mother, as well.

A substitute father is needed also at a wedding because the real one is an alcoholic. Bizarrely, there is demand even for fake funerals. "Being dead without dying is becoming a trend". At a bullet train station a scapegoat can be hired to receive the reprimand for sending a train too early.

Together with Yuichi and Mahiro we visit some of Tokyo's most charming spots: Yoyogi Park at cherry blossom time, with amusement parks, practicing swordfighters, jugglers and boat rides. Yuichi and Mahiro even console an even more lonesome little girl, bullied by others because of the colour of her skin.

Gradually we move to the territory of the increasingly artificial. There is a wishing stand for the fortune omikujis of the lonely. Special birds can be invited to eat corn from the palm. At the Fox Shrine it is possible to access powers to alter reality. A lottery winner wants to live the experience of winning again in an enactment. At a hedgehog café it is possible to feed pet hedgehogs. Fake paparazzis can be hired to help a social media wannabe become viral in the social media. In a robot hotel even the fish in the aquarium are robots. There is a photo automat where you can change your appearance and retouch anything at will.

As Ishii's assignment with Mahiro continues, things keep getting more uncanny. Mahiro's mother travels to the North to meet a famous blind oracle. On a magnificent beach by the Pacific ocean she takes a landline telephone call to the wind to connect with her vanished (dead?) husband. Mahiro shows Ishii her most cherished Instagram photos, but it turns out that her "yoga pose in Bali" has been taken on a regular beach in Japan. Mahiro's mother gives Ishii a guided tour of her home, ending in the bedroom. She sits on her bed with her beautiful thigh exposed and states in her most charming voice: "You can use anything you like in here". This is the last straw. Ishii is a professional. Real feelings shall not be involved. Lines are not crossed. But in a memorable finale we observe that he has been deeply shaken.

The MUBI Q&A after the film is worth viewing. Herzog tells Daniel Kasman how he shot the film with a small 4K camera, often at close range. What interested him in the subject was "a fundamental question of human existence. What is lie? What is truth?" "The more we are connected, the existential solitude will increase". In the 1980s I predicted that "the 21st century will be a century of solitudes". Q: How can we find out whose love is true, what relationships are real? "In my life, until today, there are two things that guide me, two essentials of real life, pura vida, as the Mexicans say." "And one is travelling on foot." "And I mean long distance travelling on foot."  "And the other one (...) is reading. Read. I do not see many films, but I do read. And those who use too much their cellphones and their social media, they don't read any more. I mean, they read tweets or so, but not cohesive, deep reading of an 800-page Tolstoy novel, for example. To anyone (...) I say: read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read." 

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL INTRO:
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL INTRO:

Larry Gross (Telluride Film Festival, 2019): "Werner Herzog breaks new ground in film form, melding the direct style of his documentary works and relentlessly inventive storytelling into an understated and sublime concoction set in Japan. His co-conspirator and star is Yuichi Ishii, the real-life CEO of Family Romance LLC, a company that rents out human surrogates for his clients’ every need—a family member for a social event, someone to take the blame for a mistake at work, a stranger to help you relive the best moment of your life. In the film, a mother asks Ishii to impersonate her long-absent husband and reconnect with her teenage daughter. The situation becomes a tangled net of transaction and emotion. Using a tiny crew and serving as his own cameraman, Herzog once again captures the idiosyncrasies of the human condition, crafting a modern fable that feels like a throwback to his early years, and yet entirely new." Larry Gross (U.S.-Japan, 2019, 89 m)





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