Werner Herzog has taken a strange reality – the Japanese company which hires out stand-in friends and relatives – and pointlessly subverted it further
Werner Herzog has come to Cannes with a stranger-than-fiction piece of work, a lo-fi headscratcher shot on video around tourist locations in Tokyo. Its pure oddness derives from its reality.
This is Herzog’s enigmatic drama-documentarised version of a real phenomenon in Japan: a company called Family Romance LLC (that is: Limited Liability Company) which for 11 years has specialised in loaning out actors to be therapeutic-surrogate figures: imitation friends or family members for those who can’t bear the absence of these people in their lives. They are required to go through the motions at parties, weddings, funerals, and even private situations: platonic escorts for the soul. You might compare this to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (2011) which had a comparable idea.
Herzog has got the real-life proprietor of this firm,...
Werner Herzog has come to Cannes with a stranger-than-fiction piece of work, a lo-fi headscratcher shot on video around tourist locations in Tokyo. Its pure oddness derives from its reality.
This is Herzog’s enigmatic drama-documentarised version of a real phenomenon in Japan: a company called Family Romance LLC (that is: Limited Liability Company) which for 11 years has specialised in loaning out actors to be therapeutic-surrogate figures: imitation friends or family members for those who can’t bear the absence of these people in their lives. They are required to go through the motions at parties, weddings, funerals, and even private situations: platonic escorts for the soul. You might compare this to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (2011) which had a comparable idea.
Herzog has got the real-life proprietor of this firm,...
- 5/18/2019
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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