Review

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter

Reviews like this are always the hardest to write. I love this strange and mysterious movie and I want you to love it too.

So I worry about over-promising, about elevating expectations. So let me say Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is a little art movie, and that some of the dialogue is in Japanese. It is a movie about a quest, with some elements of magical realism breaking in at the end. If you are the sort of person who likes movies that are highly explicit about what they are trying to tell you, you might be confounded by or disappointed in this movie. You might dismiss it as akin to one of those elliptical poems one sometimes encounters in the New Yorker, a glittering yet ultimately inconsequential bauble. You would not be wrong to think of it that way, for the movie has some of the oblique power of poetry in that it evokes the often incoherent phantoms of our interior life.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

91 Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, Shirley Venard, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, Kanako Higashi

Director: David Zellner

Rating: Unrated

Running time: 105 minutes

In English and Japanese with English subtitles

Yet if you can allow yourself to go under the spell of a motion picture, then you might be transported by Kumiko, which is the story of a wayward Japanese woman.

Though it opens with the legend, "This is a true story," you should not be taken in: The words are imported, via grainy videotape, from another film, the Coen Brothers' 1996 classic Fargo, which most of us understand didn't adhere to any particular set of facts. (Nor does Kumiko, although it is based on an urban legend that arose about a real Japanese tourist, Takako Konish, who visited the United States in 2001.)

Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi), a 29-year-old "office lady" who shares her circumscribed life and hutch-like Tokyo apartment with her pet rabbit Bunzo, apparently believes the Coens' fable: that somewhere in snowy Minnesota near the town of Brainerd a small-time hood named Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) buried a suitcase filled with cash that might be recovered by anyone with the audacity to seek it. This delusion is at least partially wishfulness -- Kumiko's eccentricities have hindered her personal and professional advancement. She is old to be an unmarried office lady. Her boss is cruel, her mother is dreadful. She generally eschews human contact. Might as well follow some unhinged bliss.

She found the videocassette of Fargo in a crevice in a rock formation on a desolate stretch of beach. It was placed there for her, it was her destiny.

When she's confronted by a library guard who wants to understand why she's trying to smuggle out a valuable atlas, she tells him she is "like a Spanish conquistador" who has "learned of untold riches hidden deep in the Americas." He doesn't understand. He can't help her. She is one of those holy fools, like Forrest Gump or Being There's Chance the Gardener, whose simple words can be taken as koans. She sews a makeshift map and -- leaving Bunzo on a bus -- lights out for the territories.

David and Nathan Zellner, the Austin, Texas-based brothers who made this movie (they co-wrote and act in it; David is credited as director), play with the self-reflexive layers of the movie, stretching the Coens' elastic joke about the expectations and gullibility of the audience to the limits of plausibility. What do you explore after all the countries are mapped? Well, maybe you can only turn to inner frontiers, to the unknown and unknowable wilderness of human desire.

Kumiko, wonderfully and heartbreakingly played by Kikuchi, is resourceful and naive, as fearless as she is vulnerable. She is not quite innocent, and she doesn't completely trust the kindness of the strangers who try to help her after she turns up in frozen Minnesota. She is an alien in a red coat (later augmented by a hotel blanket) who will not be dissuaded from her mission. She is more than a little like the stranger in a strange land portrayed by Scarlet Johansson in last year's Under the Skin.

This is a rigorous if miniature work of art, a movie that betrays tremendous discipline in every aspect, from its traditional, almost formal, visual approach to the eerie score produced by the Zellners' Austin confederates the Octopus Project. Kumiko, which I saw at last year's Little Rock Film Festival, is one of the two or three best movies I've seen in the past five years.

MovieStyle on 04/10/2015

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