Fam­i­ly Romance, LLC – first look review

Wern­er Her­zog has nev­er been a film­mak­er to play by the rules of genre or nar­ra­tive. Over the course of his career he has con­tin­ued to oper­ate with­in the bound­aries between fact and fic­tion, dra­ma and doc­u­men­tary, in his own inim­itable way. His lat­est film, Fam­i­ly Romance, LLC, is anoth­er prime exam­ple of just how effec­tive and unique that style can be.

Ishii Yuichi’s lead char­ac­ter runs the tit­u­lar com­pa­ny, a cus­tomer can hire a per­former to pre­tend to be their par­ent, a paparaz­zo snap­ping them around town, or even to take the blame for their fail­ings at work. It’s an intrigu­ing con­cept, one that seems a log­i­cal exten­sion of the phe­nom­e­nal growth of the per­for­mance indus­try in coun­tries like Japan.

Her­zog wrote the script, but based it around Yuichi’s real-life expe­ri­ences run­ning the com­pa­ny and per­form­ing as an ​“actor of the every­day”, mak­ing it one of the most lit­er­al exam­ples of a film ​‘based on a true sto­ry’. The form is a strange mix of doc­u­men­tary fram­ing com­bined with the edit­ing of a fic­tion fea­ture. There is no voiceover to sign­post the truth, and the poet­ic use of slo-mo and score sug­gest a more dra­mat­ic, con­struct­ed nar­ra­tive than you might typ­i­cal­ly find in a doc.

It’s a dis­arm­ing blend but it’s also the per­fect approach to take for a top­ic so entrenched in ques­tions of authen­tic­i­ty and iden­ti­ty. The actors are at pains to stress that they are not mere­ly imper­son­ators – they gath­er per­son­al details about the roles they take, but they don’t like to copy indi­vid­ual quirks or ref­er­ence old mem­o­ries. They feel the rela­tion­ship is more believ­able if they inhab­it it from their own per­spec­tive. From this angle, Her­zog strikes upon a para­dox­i­cal notion: at least with­in the world of film, emo­tions don’t have to be true as long as they’re real.

His choice of mate­r­i­al feels a lit­tle rev­er­ent upon clos­er inspec­tion, leav­ing out all but the soft­est crit­i­cisms of this bur­geon­ing niche indus­try. The par­tic­i­pants are often a lit­tle shy about the process, but there’s no sug­ges­tion they feel cheat­ed out of real rela­tion­ships as you might expect. Like­wise the per­form­ers appear guilt­less about their pro­fes­sion, imply­ing the ends jus­ti­fy the means when it comes to sat­is­fy­ing customers.

The ver­ité film­ing style expos­es some weak per­for­mances with­in the cast, but also pos­es a seri­ous con­cern to every style-over-sub­stance film­mak­er out there: the qual­i­ty of per­for­mances are fixed no mat­ter how you choose to shoot them. After all, Ishii is intel­li­gent and sen­si­tive in the lead role with­out the assis­tance of com­pli­cat­ed light­ing and with block­ing that’s no more sophis­ti­cat­ed than sim­ple mas­ters and over-the-shoul­der shots.

Herzog’s approach leaves us won­der­ing whether we too have been hood­winked by these mas­ter per­form­ers, but it’s hard to argue with the con­nec­tion you see on screen between Yuichi and his ​‘daugh­ter’ Mahi­ro – the rela­tion­ship which dom­i­nates the film. Her­zog takes an uncon­ven­tion­al route, but in the end he man­ages to find emo­tion­al truth in this ten­der, fun­ny and sweet sto­ry about mod­ern relationships.