Werner Herzog's feature films have often been experimental. I don't mean that Herzog's film technique is advanced or avant garde -- indeed, to the contrary, his feature (fiction) films are shot conservatively, even prosaically, using raw editing, images that are less than perfect in tone and color; his camera is often obviously hand-held and the effect is that of watching a documentary produced on low budget in which the audience must tolerate primitive film-making in exchange for the privilege of seeing images that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. (By contrast, Herzog's recent documentaries have been well-financed and are lavishly produced.) The experimental character of Herzog's features relates to their idiosyncratic subject matter, topics that can be expressed as a series of "thought-experiments" -- what would happen if a child raised in a cellar without language were to encounter the world? (Kaspar Hauser); can a movie be made in which all actors are hypnotized? (Heart of Glass); if a mentally ill man from Berlin found himself in Wisconsin, how would things turn out? (Stroszek) Could a movie be made in which the entire cast are midgets or dwarves? (Even Dwarves Started Small) and so on. Herzog's Family Romance, LLC. (2019) is a thought experiment of this kind: What would happen if people could hire actors to simulate participants in family relationships, even family members? What would happen if I could rent a wife for special occasions -- no sex involved, but just a woman paid to play the perfect spouse when I am required to attend a funeral or wedding? This is a forbidden experiment in some ways, one too fraught with all sorts of dangers, but, apparently, underway in a very real sense in Japan, the place where it is always tomorrow.
Family Romance, LLC is a Tokyo business that rents out actors to play the roles of family members who have gone missing or are otherwise incapacitated. The owner of the business, Mr. Ishii, is a handsome young man with Matinee idol features -- he looks like various Asian movie stars and exudes a sense of familiarity; he's like a suave Tokyo Cary Grant, but younger. As the film begins, we see Ishii meeting a sullen-looking 12 year old girl -- she's wearing a hoodie with black horns representing, I think, a Studio Ghibli-animated character. Ishii claims to be the girl's father who has not been present in her life. At first, the girl is suspicious and withdrawn, but, later, she warms to "father" and begins to confide secrets in him and ask for his advice. Ishii also assumes an actual paternal role and provides parenting advice to the girl's attractive mother, apparently a well-heeled divorcee who lives in a very nice suburban house. Herzog's film has only a vestigial plot and the movie seems an excuse to string together a series of vignettes about modern Japan, episodes that would seem irritatingly disconnected but for the director's brilliant eye and penetrating exposition of Tokyo's post-human milieu. We see Ishii involved in all sorts of encounters. He's hired to represent the father of the bride at a wedding -- the real father is an alcoholic (his wife claims he's epileptic) and can't attend the ceremony without the risk of dire consequences. Ishii explores a Robot Hotel equipped with colorful robotic fish, segmented koi that swim in a large aquarium under saturating lights that modulate through the spectrum. (The sequence is similar to the jellyfish that we see in Herzog's films about Little Dieter, the German-American pilot who was captured by the Vietnamese and escaped from a horrifying prison camp through Laos.) The humanoid robots are firmly astraddle the "uncanny valley"-- they are so human-looking as to be frightening. Ishii prices funerals and caskets -- perhaps, he will have to stage a fake funeral. With the teenage girl -- she's called Mahiro -- he goes to a Hedgehog cafe, where patrons play with hedge-hogs (filmed in huge close-ups). Along the way, we see Japanese street performers, some of whom apparently work for Ishii; when Ishii has a street performer take his picture with Mahiro, the man grimaces in a weird way and, then, performs an intricate pantomime. Kids in a park simulate samurai battles and, then, commit fake hara kiri. Herzog seems hell-bent to incorporate as much stereotypical information about Japan in the film as possible: there's origami, cherry blossom viewing, the Bullet Train and the Tokyo Tv tower, an oracle contacts a dead man and speaks for him, Mahiro's mother goes to the tsunami-damaged north part of Japan where she sits among rocks on the seashore, using an old-style rotary telephone to speak to the spirits of those lost in catastrophe (although when Ishii asks the woman who she was calling, she says it was someone living and not dead -- by this point, the mother has fallen in love with the gracious and kind Ishii and, probably, is reaching out to him over the spirit-telephone.) One woman has won 20 million yen (180,000 dollars) in a lottery and yearns for the sensation of winning again -- she's a plain middle-aged woman who seems to be one of life's perennial losers. Ishii stages another "win" for her, something like the images that show people who have won the Publisher's Clearing House lottery. (The woman has a perplexed, bitter-sweet smile on her face -- she seems to recognize that the fake lottery is inevitably less satisfying than the real one and that this effort to recreate past happiness has been unsuccessful. Another young woman hires Ishii to trail her through the Ginza entertainment district with a crew of fake paparazzi, thereby, imitating a starlet on the prowl with her horde of admirers. Of course, some of the passers-by are fooled and they take pictures themselves of the girl vamping as she struts down the street. After a half-dozen encounters with Mahiro (and sometimes a little half-Black girl who she has befriended, Airi), it's apparent that the adolescent loves Ishii and that he plays in irreplaceable role in her life. Ishii is alarmed. He says: "At Family Romance, we are not allowed to love or be loved." But it's too late, the child loves him and so does Mahiro's mother. The older woman asks Ishii to move in with them and play the part of Mahiro's father permanently. Seated seductively on her bed, the mother says: "You can use this bedroom and everything in it." Ishii is baffled and doesn't know what to do. He suggests that they will have to stage a funeral -- this is why we have seen him with the mortician pricing caskets. Ishii doesn't know how to get out of the dilemma, nor does Herzog -- Herzog is honest enough, I think, to acknowledge that there is no way out of the moral and ethical dilemma that Family Romance, LLC. has created. Ishii begins to wonder whether his own family is merely acting; have they also been rented? he wonders. We see him go to what seems to be his home. But he remains outside, as if afraid to enter -- he toys with his house key A child approaches a door-window glazed and partially opaque, putting her little hands on the glass. And so the film ends.
The movie is very gripping and its odd episodic structure seems somehow liberating. Herzog is not known for his warmth, but this picture is extremely sentimental and, even, romantic. All of the characters are caught in a perpetual cycle of performance, acting that Herzog suggests characterizes modernity. People are fungible -- they can be substituted for one another, but this doesn't mean that the emotions aren't real. It's obvious that Ishii is in love with the little girl and her mother as well, but doesn't know how to express this emotion -- particularly within the boundaries of Family Romance's business model. Herzog's film making seems to lack any kind of craft, but, in fact, the film is carefully designed. An attentive viewer should take note of Herzog's use of hot pink in the scenes with Mahiro. In one shot, Herzog pays an extremely perverse, even funny homage to Ozu. The lottery winner is summoned to the door of her home. We see a long corridor with side-rooms, a typical Ozu shot of an interior intricate with a geometry of rectangles and squares. But Ozu films these scenes from tatami level, that is, from the vantage of a person seated on a floor-mat. Herzog puts his camera up close to the ceiling and shoots down the hallway exactly as Ozu would design the shot, but making the image odd by using a high, as opposed to, low camera angle. The editing is intentionally crude -- there are many documentary-style jump-cuts. Some of the shots are over-exposed and the camera-work (done by Herzog guerilla-style with a hidden camera) is primitive. These technical deficits are offset by radiant drone shots, some of them shooting vertically down on city streets or Yoyogi Park, a huge public space where much of the action takes place. Since the film is about Japan, Herzog, of course, includes spectacular samurai battles fought by teenage boys in the park, the combatants whirling and lunging to samizen music. Much of the film has a documentary style -- and, in fact, Herzog blurs the borders between documentary and feature fiction film: Mr. Ishii is, in fact, the CEO of Family Romance, LLC, a real business in Tokyo and, of course, exotic places like the Robot Hotel and the Hedgehog Cafe really exist. The film is excellent and, I think, very personal to Herzog (although he attributes the idea to a student in his Rogue Film School, someone named Roc Motin, a young film-maker whom Herzog lavishly praises.) Herzog has always admitted that he fabricates parts of his documentaries, just as aspects of his feature films are documentary in nature. The notion of truthfulness in film making has been central to Herzog, articulated most rhapsodically in his so-called Minnesota Declaration, delivered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1999; in that declaration, Herzog declared that film aims at a Higher Truth and that this Higher Truth isn't accessible unless "ecstatic" -- "ecstatic" truth involves falsehoods. In Family Romance, LLC, Herzog seems to be coming to terms with the notion of what it means to invent and fabricate, particularly in the realm of intimate family relationships. The film is almost a parody of Herzog's style -- he seems to find as many bizarre and kitschy aspects of Japanese life as possible -- but it's an important picture if you are, as I am, a life-long admirer of the director's work.
(As usual, Herzog, who is a great showman, is the best advocate for his work. MUBI shows this film with an introduction by Herzog, addressing the main issues in the film. There is a blurry ZOOM Q & A, with the MUBI curator, after the picture that is illuminating as well. Herzog pontificates as to the importance of reading and, of course, walking -- he reprises several familiar tales. But he also explains how some of the shots were made in the movie, including an extremely alarming image of a bullet train moving at an incomprehensibly high speed -- taking this kind of picture is forbidden and Herzog and his tiny crew had to flee when security guards chased them, each "departing in a different direction," he drily says. The MUBI curator has good questions that challenge Herzog who often does these sorts of interviews on auto-pilot, just repeating his greatest hits, anecdotes that he has narrated many times before. The curator asks Herzog what he would hire Family Romance, LLC to do for him. Herzog becomes nostalgic and says that he lives in LA where no one speaks his Bavarian dialect -- he would hire someone who knows "how to handle a soccer ball" and would kick the ball around, he says, and swear in Bavarian.)
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