Werner Herzog examines the cost of relationships and Japan's rent-a-family industry in 'Family Romance, LLC.'
The film opens with a longish scene in which a father meets his 12-year-old daughter Mahiro after a decade’s absence, and they spend time in a Tokyo park enjoying the cherry blossoms. It’s both awkward and touching, but we soon learn the man is an entrepreneur hired by the girl’s mother to impersonate her ex-husband, who disappeared years earlier.real life, a businessman who runs a company called … Family Romance.
As the relationship with Mahiro continues, we also see Ishii rendering services to other clients: providing a father to walk a bride down the aisle; allowing a former lottery winner to once again feel the exhilaration of being the chosen one; helping an aspiring starlet create a viral moment with fake paparazzi; and accepting a supervisor’s berating on behalf of a disgraced railway worker.It’s a premise full of intrigue.
Herzog, who also wrote the screenplay, clearly relishes the contradictions as he blurs the line between reality and drama , but “Family Romance, LLC” can’t always bear the weight of the questions. Acting as his own camera operator, Herzog largely appears content to observe the ritual dance embedded in the multiple layers of artifice, and the film drags at times; its lean, vérité approach lacking the narrative thrust to fully engage.
But in the final act, the film embraces some of those larger points, and Herzog ends with a striking final image leaving us to contemplate the transactional nature and true cost of all human relationships.
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