Everyone knows people they see all the time, often at work, but don’t know much about. What do those people do with their spare time? In the case of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, who has had roles in Babel, 47 Ronin, and Pacific Rim), a 29-year-old Tokyo office assistant, she spends much of time alone, watching an old videotape of the movie Fargo. Her curiosity is not idle, because she believes she has pinpointed the location of a suitcase full of money that the Steve Buscemi character has buried in the film. This perhaps does not seem like a promising idea for a feature film, but David and Nathan Zellner (brothers, like Fargo filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen) make it work. Lars and the Real Girl seems roughly comparable.
Kumiko is a fish out of water in America, where she barely speaks the language, but also in Japan, where she lives a solitary existence. Kikuchi is in every scene of the movie and creates a character who remains enormously sympathetic even as her interactions with Japanese and Americans are sometimes very funny, even as she behaves deceitfully. There are a couple of nits I could pick with the plot, but the character is always believable. Besides the unique story, I enjoyed this film for its portrayals of infrequent film subjects: naiveté, language barrier, and snowy northern Minnesota. Only the ending was a letdown, but maybe because I wanted to keep watching Kumiko (and Kikuchi).
IMDb link
viewed 10/25/14 7:15 pm at Roxy [PFS Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14
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