Family Romance LLC: Herzog's fiction-documentary hybrid explores a world of paid surrogates for all aspects of Japanese life
Original-Cin: A Minus
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-minus
One of Werner Herzog’s specialties, in both his fictional and documentary films, is to explore the experiences of human limits: The wild, the deep past, madness, the abyss, journeys into the jungle.
A hybrid, Family Romance LLC is about a more abstract frontier, the border between the real and the fictional. As Herzog has made clear, the film is not a documentary, but a scripted drama, shot in handheld documentary style with non-professional actors. The central figure in the film, a real-life handsome young Tokyo businessman, Yuichi Ishii, using his own name and portraying his real-life business called Family Romance. The service he provides is a rent-a-relationship surrogate service. Need a temporary father? Stand-in husband? Best friend? Yuichi, or one of his team, will be the surrogate for a fee plus expenses.
For a fee, Ishii pretends to be 12-year-old Mahiro’s estranged father in Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC
We begin during the March cherry blossom season in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park. Ishii, dressed in a suit and tie, approaches a sad-looking 12-year-old girl, Mahiro, and introduces himself as her long-estranged father. He gradually draws her out, apologizes for leaving her and her mother ten years before. Together, pose for pictures with the cherry branches, watch young men juggling and staging pretend samurai sword-fights for the park’s crowds.
Later, Ishii meets with Mahiro’s mother, who goes over a checklist of things she wanted him to accomplish. She hands him a cheque. He produces receipts for his expenses for the day. They bow goodbye and promise to work together again soon.
The kind of jobs that Yuichi takes on are varied, and often emotionally complicated. A middle-aged woman, who lives alone, once won a lottery worth 20-million yen (about a quarter-million Canadian dollars), which she says was the only exciting thing that happened in her life. She pays Isshi, along with cheerleaders and a fake electrical company employee, to re-enact that magic moment when her life became less ordinary. In another scenario, Yuichi stands in for a deliquent bullet train employee to take a humiliating tongue-lashing from his supervisor.
Occasionally, the film digresses into other weird-to-foreigners aspects of popular Japanese culture. A young woman, determined to be a social influencer, hires a crew of fake paparazzi to swarm her in public, while Yuichi records it for her Instagram feed.
In another scene, he visits a hotel where the reception staff are life-like robots, ostensibly as a way of exploring a cross-promotion with his business. Even more tangentially, he visits a funeral home, where the owner explains that people sometimes ask to lie in a coffin to see what being dead is like.
Between these ventures, Ishii returns for new outings with Mahiro, growing closer to his surrogate daughter. He also continues conferring with her mother, in a situation that becomes complicated as emotions become confused with business.
There’s a fairy-tale aspect to Family Romance LLC, with its fluttery score of piano, violin and recorder music, the emphasis on cute children and generally sunny perspective that we don’t usually associate with Herzog’s abyss-plumbing dread.
The film had only a mildly warm critical reception at Cannes, as a Herzog-Lite, neither a revelatory documentary nor a cathartic drama.
Yet, the central theme, of empathy for sale, has its grim side. Similar themes are explored in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps, a drama about actors hired to impersonate dead relatives to comfort their families. It also figured in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, featuring former adult actress Sasha Grey in a drama about the emotional burden of sex work.
In the current moment, with our wary physical distancing and awkward artificial socializing, Family Romance LLC’s gaze into the uncanny valley absolutely chimes with the times.
Family Romance LLC. Directed and written by Werner Herzog. Starring Yuichi Ishii and Mahiro Tanimoto. Available on MUBI: https://mubi.com/films/family-romance-llc. The service currently has a one-week free trial offer.