2014 drama
Rating: 15/20
Plot: A Japanese woman who mistakes Fargo as some sort of documentary ventures to North Dakota to find the bag of money that Steve Buscemi buried in the snow.
This is from the Zellner brothers who made an askew Western called Damsel that I wasn't able to see because it didn't screen anywhere around here. It was on my radar anyway because I liked the premise. Like Fargo, this is based on a true story, and like Fargo, most of that true story is manufactured by the screenwriter. To be fair, this has more of an element of truth than the Coen brothers' classic. There really was Japanese woman who was found in the area, but her name wasn't Kumiko. It was Takato Konishi. Some sources reported--maybe erroneously--that Konishi really was hunting for a windshield scraper and the bag of money buried beneath. But like Fargo, it doesn't matter if it matches any reality anyway. In the Coens' movie, it works as a "true story" because humanity has this dark undercurrent and the sort of things that happen so shockingly in Fargo could happen almost anywhere in America. In Kumiko, the "true story" works because people really are as lonely and/or alienated as its central character. The VHS panning fuzziness promising that this is a true story doesn't need to be true because the story resonates anyway.
I'm not sure if Rinko Kikuchi, the woman who plays Kumiko, is a good actress or if she's just good at creating this character that sucks all the energy out of everything. She doesn't say a whole lot although she does have interactions. She's in a library, she has interactions on a bus, she meets some religious fellows at an airport, she is befriended by a woman who picks her up on the side of the road, she's driven miles and miles by a hearing-impaired cab driver, she encounters a piano tinkler and expert map unfolder named Brad, and she spends a lot of time with a policeman with an out-of-control siren who has the good sense to take her to a Chinese restaurant in order to have a translator. She also meets Brad, a piano tinkler and expert map unfolder.
But Kumiko is a character who works best when she's all by her lonesome. She's most natural when she's completely unnatural, walking around with a red hood like a fairy tale character, nature itself playing the part of the Big Bad Wolf. Or maybe she's more of a tall tale character, an urban legend. She does come face to face with a Paul Bunyan statue, but she has little in common with him because he's got a friend--an anatomically-correct Babe the Big Blue Ox. Of course, she actually has an animal sidekick of her own--a rabbit. There's a really touching scene when she has to get rid of her sidekick though. I don't remember Bunyan leaving Babe behind to chop down trees or anything.
A big flaw in the Zellner's movie is an oppressively loud ambient score. I had the closed captioning on, and at one point, it said "Chimes evolve into magical music." I like that caption a lot more than almost all of the music in this although we do get Pete Drake's "Dreams" at one moment. Drake was a country singer who tried to take advantage of the potential of the vocoder. You should probably YouTube that one.
No comments:
Post a Comment