Fam­i­ly Romance, LLC

Over the course of his career, Wern­er Her­zog has oper­at­ed 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 his style can be.

Ishii Yuichi runs the tit­u­lar com­pa­ny, where 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. 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’. 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.

His choice of mate­r­i­al feels a lit­tle rev­er­ent upon clos­er inspec­tion, leav­ing out all but the soft­est crit­i­cisms of this bur­geon­ing niche indus­try. 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. 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 he man­ages to find emo­tion­al truth in this ten­der and fun­ny sto­ry about mod­ern relationships.

Fam­i­ly Romance, LLC is avail­able to watch from 3 July via Mod­ern Films.