Family Romance, LLC

A man is waiting for a girl in a park. She is twelve and has never seen her father. He introduces himself as her father. But he is not; he is an employee the mother has hired. Yuichi Ishii runs a company in Tokyo and the company rents out people. If a father is needed at a wedding he sends a father, if someone is needed to be told off he sends an employee, if a family is needed at a graduation a family is assembled. The girl grows used to him. The mother extends the arrangement. Yuichi starts asking himself a question: whose relationship is this. Werner Herzog directs and operated the camera himself. Yuichi Ishii has the lead and Ishii really did found such a company; he plays himself. Mahiro Tanimoto is in the cast. It is an American and Japanese production. The film was given a special screening at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. It was shot in Japan and most of the cast are not professional actors. The film stands between fiction and documentary; the scenes are written but the situations come from a real business. The matter it treats is feeling sold as a service; the film shows it not as an oddity but as a business model. Herzog adds no commentary and the camera keeps its distance. The narrative turns over in the scenes with Yuichi's own family, where the man cannot be certain of his own life. Its limit is form; the narrative is loose, the acting uneven, and the ending open. Who it is for: viewers who like Herzog's cinema and mixtures of fiction and documentary. Who it is not for: it is loose, slow, and the ending gives no closure.