Kumiko, the Trea­sure Hunter

Cast your minds back to the Coen broth­ers’ 1996 film Far­go, where Steve Buscemi’s rat­ty hood, clutch­ing a weep­ing gun­shot wound to the cheek, hur­ried­ly buries a brief­case full of ban­knotes in the deep Min­neso­ta snow some­where along an anony­mous coun­try road. Now, return to present day, and ​“real­i­ty”. Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is a put-upon sec­re­tary in mod­ern day Tokyo who self-iden­ti­fies as a trea­sure hunter. With her rab­bit side­kick, Bun­zo, she spends her down-time try­ing to deci­pher cryp­tic maps, one of which leads her to a bat­tered VHS copy of… Fargo.

Resus­ci­tat­ing the tape as best she can, she is able to spy through the elec­tric mist a vision of a man bury­ing a suit­case of cash. Fate has spo­ken: this is her next mis­sion, and there’s noth­ing that can stop her from com­plet­ing it.

Though it seems exact­ly like one of those movies which is far more fun to read about than it is to actu­al­ly watch, cred­it must go to its mak­ers, David and Nathan Zell­ner, for using this eccen­tric set-up as a way to dis­cuss their own mys­tery: is Kumiko clin­i­cal­ly insane to want to achieve this goal or is her odyssey any dif­fer­ent from any­one seek­ing per­son­al val­i­da­tion through some ran­dom achieve­ment? And what is life if not a jour­ney towards an ill-defined and prob­a­bly non-exis­tent goal? The rea­son why the film works so well is down to the immense empa­thy the Zell­ners extend to their characters.

Kumiko, a dam­aged young woman whose actions might be a reac­tion to her swad­dling moth­er or sleazy boss, puts her­self through immense psy­cho­log­i­cal strain to reach her goal. The peo­ple she meets along the road are deter­mined to help her despite hav­ing no real con­cep­tion of what she wants, and this isn’t just due to a sense of cul­tur­al alienation.