Family Romance LLC review: Werner Herzog's fakery-filled docudrama sparks genuine joy
Dir: Werner Herzog; Starring: Yuichi Ishii, Mahiro Tanimoto, Miki Fujimaki, Takashi Nakatani, Kumi Manda. No cert, 89 mins
If you were cast as the bad guy in a glitzy new Star Wars series on Disney+, what would you spend the paycheque on? OK, OK: now what if you were Werner Herzog? The maverick German director’s recent villainous stint on The Mandalorian has financed this wonderfully strange and riddling docudrama, about a (real) Japanese agency that supplies surrogate relatives to lonely souls in need. It is Herzog’s best film since 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams – seemingly slight at first, but with a premise that snags in your brain, and moments of pure oddball transcendence.
Family Romance is a business – the LLC stands for limited liability company – was founded in 2009 by Yuichi Ishii, and is one of a number of so-called rental family services to have sprung up in Japan since the early 1990s. If your alcoholic husband can’t be trusted to walk your daughter down the aisle, or you can’t face a dressing-down at work that needs to be levelled at someone, then Ishii-san is your man: he’ll find a stand-in to fulfil the obligation, and the wheels of propriety can turn on unimpeded.
This might sound like the kind of cultural oddity that would take a westerner a while to get their head around, but happily the film provides ample directions. It begins with a smartly dressed man waiting anxiously outside Tokyo’s Harajuku Station, seemingly scanning the crowds for a recognisable face. A 12-year-old girl appears: her name is Mahiro (Mahiro Tanimoto), and the man introduces himself as her estranged father.
The two stroll through a nearby park, admire the cherry blossom, watch a sword-fighting display, and begin to sweetly, falteringly reconnect. The only fly in the ointment is that this man isn’t actually her father at all: he is in fact Ishii, and in the next scene he’s feeding back intel on the meeting to Mahiro’s mother, who has secretly put him up to the job.
The experiences Ishii’s company sells are like little pockets of fiction in the real world, and this is exactly how Herzog shoots them – out on the streets of Tokyo, surrounded by organic hubbub. Yet as the film goes on, it becomes clear that at least some of these encounters have been scripted, or at least engineered, by Herzog himself, and the line between truth and imposture becomes increasingly, enticingly muddied.
Beyond the surface quirk, Family Romance, LLC is a film about how much of our modern emotional life depends on carefully constructed and maintained falsehoods – see Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for details – but it also recognises that such fakery can move us for real, and in ways that reality rarely allows.
Herzog-heads will delight in a scene in which Ishii appears to undergo an existential crisis while staring at a robotic fish for minutes on end. But the one I keep returning to features a housewife who asks Ishii’s firm to re-stage the moment years ago that she won a six-figure sum on the lottery – a sum she went on to squander on more lottery tickets in the futile hope of being able to experience the thrill of winning again. The cheerleaders, streamers, and giant novelty cheque Ishii sends to her door are a sham. But the joy Herzog captures flashing across her face is all genuine.
Family Romance, LLC is available to watch for free on MUBI on Friday July 3 only, and can be rented from MUBI and modernfilms.com thereafter
