Werner Herzog is one of the few leading filmmakers whose work is divided equally between fiction and nonfiction: for over half a century, he has produced both documentaries and narrative films, sometimes even making one of each on the same topic. With his latest project, Family Romance, LLCHerzog is closer than ever to finally combine the two approaches into one film. His theme is a Japanese company that allows clients to “rent” to substitute friends and family, that is, actors who will play whatever role in their life they need. To explore this phenomenon, the director introduces CEO Yuichi Ishii as himself, following him with a lightweight camera, filming in the style of a high-quality documentary. However, each scene and encounter is also clearly written, going far beyond the usual truthfulness curves (such as organizing certain conversations) that Herzog makes in his documents. This is sometimes called constructed nonfiction, and for Herzog, it may be another attempt to capture the elusive “ecstatic truth” that he once spoke of“The type that can only be revealed through a combination of the real and the manufactured.”
The approach theoretically adapts to the theme. Herzog, after all, is examining a livelihood that very explicitly erases the boundaries that separate reality from simulation of reality. Essentially a non-sexual escort service, Family Romance caters to a wide range of needs, so we see employees fill multiple roles: taking the blame for customer error in the workplace by pretending to be the responsible party. ; posing as the father of a girlfriend because her current father has a destructive drinking problem; even preparing for a coffin, to play the guest of honor in a disembodied stele. (Oddly enough, Family Romance, named after a Freudian thesis, is not the only game in town. Social surrogacy is apparently a growing industry in Japan, in part due to an alleged loneliness epidemic.)
It turns out that Ishii is not only the CEO of the company, but also one of its most popular “artists”. Although Herzog recreates several of his strangest tasks, the plot revolves around one job in particular: playing 12-year-old Mahiro’s estranged father (Mahiro Tanimoto), who does not remember his true father and therefore does not You have an idea that you’re being misleading. . (Nor does a viewer get cold, since the film begins with a reunion between her and “Dad”, the truth of the agreement was only revealed a few minutes later). Surprisingly, that element of the story is drawn directly from Ishii. resume; She has talked about a similar concert long-term before, upholding the lie of parenting even when her fake daughter grew up and went to college. Which, of course, raises all kinds of questions, ethical and logistical. How can she and the girl’s mother keep up the charade as their social circle continues to grow? Aren’t they afraid they might destroy her if she ever finds out? How could anyone afford to keep paying for an indefinite parenting experience?
Basically the public face of his entire strange industry (he even appeared in a Conan O’Brien episode, which hints at Sacha Baron Cohen’s possible problem of becoming too recognizable to put on costumes), Ishii has been candid in interviews about his conflicting feelings about work. One wonders if his insistence that the business is altruistic at heart, he has sworn that the goal is to make your services obsolete by helping clients recover or grow emotionally, is just a justification for what, essentially, is making a living. However, even when the plot focuses on the subject’s doubts about his profession, Family Romance, LLC it doesn’t deal much with its contradictions or psychology. It’s also not especially enlightening to hire someone who plays other people to play himself on-screen – perhaps aware that he is also representing your company, Ishii is shown as a courteous figure.
Maybe there is a point for that. If your job often involves feigning emotions and forging fake relationships, there will come a time when you stop being yourself, when you forgeWho you really are? But while Herzog builds this entire hybrid movie smoothly out of the ordinary around Ishii, he seems less interested in man and more in the broader notion than all of modern life is acting, and that there is an element of role play in all relationships. We know this because dialogue often bluntly underscores that idea. When, for example, Ishii discovers that Mahiro has cheatedDespite knowing where a particular Instagram photo was taken, Herzog can’t let the implications speak for themselves: he has to force his protagonist to say out loud, “We’re both lying to each other.” Sometimes, too, the director seems to make up for the absence of his editorial voiceover editorial by turning his subjects / actors into spokespersons. While visiting a hotel manned by realistic robots, one of the few sequences that seems to belong to one of Herzog’s most fuzzy documentaries, Ishii asks, “In the future, do you think they will have dreams?” It’s hard not to hear the words in the director’s often parodied Teutonic accent.
At all times, Herzog keeps a mocking distance, marveling at the strangeness of this stranger-than-fiction business without having to deal with it. Despite the meta-framework, the film is not half as revealing as a three-year interview with Ishii in The atlantic, nor the piece in depth in The New Yorker on trend Perhaps the mixed-mode strategy was not correct for this material after all. A less slippery dramatization conceptually could complicate unusual professional-personal relationships, without the need to stay true to Ishii’s real-life experiences. Conversely, a more direct documentary could address the more important questions that Herzog barely brushes against in fiction. Family Romance, LLC It runs on both sides of the line between the two touches and finds no ecstatic truth there. Like those mysteriously flickering robots that run the concierge desk, he’s trapped in a mysterious valley.
.
