Review: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter
If judged by its title, one would expect Kumiko the Treasure Hunter to center around a quest or an adventure. Its protagonist would seem destined for a certain iconic status - her Rid Riding Hood-esque hoodie and makeshift patchwork poncho designed to be as recognisable as Indiana Jones' bullwhip, fedora, and leather jacket. Her discovery of a VHS copy of The Coen Brothers' Fargo, hidden beneath a rock in a dark little cavern, is treated in subtly mythic tones. The adventure that ensues, however, is not filled with thrills and chills, at least not the kind audiences are primed to anticipate.
Kumiko is 29, unmarried, and working as an "office lady" for a Japanese businessman (Nobuyuki Katsube). Her fellow office ladies are younger, brighter-eyed, and engage in chirpy chatter about permed eyelashes. By contrast, Kumiko is detached and socially awkward. She lives in a dimly lit and cluttered apartment with her rabbit Bunzo as her only companion. Fargo, specifically the scene where Steve Buscemi buries a briefcase full of money in the snow, awakens something within her.
Kumiko becomes obsessed with this scene, wearing out the already deteriorated tape with her repeated rewindings. She jots down notes in her notebook, she even attempts to steal an atlas from the local library. "I am like a Spanish conquistador," she explains to the security guard. She believes she has learned of hidden treasures and she believes it is her destiny to go to Fargo to unearth them.
The beauty of this unusual and mostly beguiling film is the slow realisation that this is a young woman's journey into madness. The signs are there from the start - when Kumiko is first seen in her apartment, hair unkempt and dressed in a white nightgown, she already resembles a mental patient - yet the premise does not seem to tilt in that direction. Kumiko is disguised as a figure who is not of her world, who does not fit with society's expectations of what a woman should be. When her boss tells her most women her age would already be married with children, she responds, "We all have our own path." When her mother makes similar comments, Kumiko cuts short their phone conversation by saying, "I have important things to do."
Kumiko will echo that line - "I have more important things to do" - in a later conversation with her mother and the words evolve from something softly defiant to a warning cry of desperation. Once in the so-called New World to at last follow her path, Kumiko is helped along the way by the goodhearted citizens of Minnesota, including an old woman (Shirley Venard) who offers her hot cocoa and a place to stay for the night. Kumiko shares that she wants to go to Fargo, but the old woman thinks that's no place for a tourist: "That's too cold, that's no fun." The old woman, in hindsight, is almost like an oracle. "It gets dark real early," she notes just before she remarks, "Solitude is just fancy loneliness." Kumiko is Red Riding Hood wanting to go to grandmother's house and being forewarned of the danger at every turn.
David and Nathan Zellner fashion a rigorously surreal film. The long, tangled ribbons of the VHS tape take a strange, slightly alien quality, as if they represented Kumiko's intestines being unravelled. There is a superbly creepy image of Kumiko's figure standing in the middle of a frozen lake. A plane being de-iced is like something out of a dream. Yet the Zellners are also capable of delivering an unexpectedly devastating moment, such as the one where Kumiko abandons Bunzo before setting off for Minneapolis.
Rinko Kikuchi is beautifully cast, expressing a range of emotions with the barest of words and gestures. She has an extraordinary scene early in the film where Kumiko is recognised by an old acquaintance Michi (Kanako Higashi). Kumiko puts on a polite smile and engages in the small talk, but it's clear she would rather be anywhere else but there. When Michi asks for her phone number, Kikuchi somehow contorts her body so that Kumiko resembles a turtle retreating into its shell.
One can't truly pinpoint when Kumiko the Treasure Hunter effectively departs from reality - perhaps it was never rooted in reality to begin with. Like Fargo, the film bills itself as based on a true story - or at least based on an urban legend that has taken on a ring of truth: a young Japanese woman, Takako Konishi, who was found dead in Minnesota in 2001. Her death was a suicide but, due to a misunderstanding, the media conflated it so that it was seen as a result of her believing Fargo was factual rather than fictitious. Konishi's tale was documented in Paul Berczeller's 2003 film. Its title - This Is a True Story.
Kumiko the Treasure Hunter
Directed by: David Zellner
Written by: David Zellner, Nathan Zellner
Starring: Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, Kanako Higashi, Shirley Venard, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner
