Review: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014)
A mentally ill Japanese woman fixates on the suitcase full of cash from a different movie
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014)
Directed by David Zellner
Written by David Zellner and Nathan Zellner
Most of the descriptions for this obscure movie, which came out ten years ago but which I’d never heard of before seeing it on the schedule of the Angelika Film Center (in Sacramento (and good for that small city for having a three-screen art house!) seem to indicate that it’s a comedy: A Japanese woman gets the idea that the suitcase full of cash buried in the snow by the Steve Buscemi character in “Fargo” (1996) is real, and she sets out to dig it up. As a comedy it writes itself, but the joke wouldn’t be feature-length; it’s a skit on SNL, or on the Rinko Kikuchi Comedy Hour Special — if the film’s star were an up-and-coming comedian and if this were the year 1971.
Such a comedy would require pandering to Americans’ stereotypes of Japanese as being so naïve as to believe that the events in a movie are real, as much as “Fargo” itself pandered to the you-betcha stereotypes of Minnesotans. “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” is not a comedy, but a stark, if sympathetic, portrait of mental illness.
Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is an Office Lady at a Tokyo company where her main duty seems to be to make tea and run errands for a senior executive, Sakagami (Nobuyuki Katsube). At 29 she is too old for this role; as her boss points out, most “OLs” (they really are called that in Japan) get married and quit by age 25. She stands out, not only because of her age but because she is so obviously suffering from major depression: she can hardly speak or meet people’s eyes, and she has developed an ideé fixe about the “Fargo” suitcase full of cash. Rapidly decompensating as we watch, when her boss gives her a company credit card to buy an anniversary present for his wife, Kumiko takes the opportunity to flee her life. Instead of shopping for the present, she buys a ticket to Minneapolis-St. Paul in what seems like the middle of winter.
Determined to get to Fargo somehow — she’s sure she will recognize the treasure site, located by a seemingly infinitely long pasture fence, when she sees it — she’s waylaid by missionaries, flat tires, and well-meaning people who try both to help her and to dissuade her from her mission. One old lady who rescues Kumiko from the snowy tundra suggests that instead of Fargo she could show her the Mall of America. A well-meaning cop tries to help, but she runs away when he tries to explain to Kumiko the futility of her quest. (At least they don’t talk like the Minnesotans in the Coen Brothers film, but the cop, played by director-co-writer David Zellner, does commit one bonehead error worthy of the original movie: to aid in communication with the visitor, he takes her to a Chinese restaurant thinking that its manager surely can speak “at least a couple of sentences” of Japanese.)
Soon she’s alone, lost in the woods, and hallucinating. The bleakness goes on, aided by a rich, horror-worthy soundtrack by The Octopus Project (an Austin group which, according to their website, continues working with the Zellner filmmaking brothers).
It turns out that the movie is based on a true event, in which a Japanese woman traveled to Minnesota and died in the snowy woods. According to Wikipedia1, her death was rumored to have something to do with the search for the “Fargo” suitcase of cash, and the movie is essentially an expansion of that rumor. A 2003 article by a Guardian journalist who visited the site of the real woman’s death and even made a short film about it is also interesting.
I wouldn’t say the movie has a lot to say. As with any film that depicts the reality of office work, its view of the stultifying atmosphere of Japanese business life is scathing; you’d think working there would be enough to make anyone depressed. (Then again, the suicide rate for Japan is pretty high, almost twice that of the U.S.2)
Rinko Kikuchi is a great screen presence. You may have seen her in “Norwegian Wood,” the 2010 movie version of the Haruki Murakami novel, or in 2013’s “Pacific Rim” and its 2018 sequel; presently she’s in the HBO Max series “Tokyo Vice.” With her penetrating gaze, she commands every scene she’s in. She’s reason enough — the main reason, really — to see this quirky but serious film if you get the chance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Takako_Konishi
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/suiciderate.html