Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter turns an urban legend about a Fargo obsessive into a funny-sad saga starring Pacific Rim’s Rinko Kikuchi.
Not a recommended bunny diet — Rinko Kikuchi in Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
Sean Porter / Amplify Releasing
Fargo starts with a lie. Contrary to what its opening title card (carried over into the FX series) claims, the deadpan Coen brothers classic is not based on a true story. There was no real life Jerry Lundegaard, no Marge Gunderson, no Carl Showalter. There are scraps of fact to the story, but it's mostly the filmmakers' own creation, fiction in the guise of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction.
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, which is now in select theaters, doubles down on the (mostly) untruths. The movie is based on a Fargo-centric urban legend that sprang up around Takako Konishi, a Japanese woman who was found dead outside a small Minnesota town in late 2001. It was reported that Konishi traveled to the Midwest in a misguided attempt to find the $900,000 that Steve Buscemi's character buries on the side of the road in Fargo, the kind of novelty news story that gets picked up everywhere — the kind that Fargo aped.
Only it wasn't true. Konishi took the journey specifically to commit suicide, heartbroken after the end of an affair with a married American man. The Fargo connection was all the result of a misunderstanding she had with some local police.
Sean Porter / Amplify Releasing
The eponymous Kumiko, based on Konishi and played by Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, Babel), is twice removed from the characters in Fargo, but she's their spiritual sibling, another figure caught between ridiculousness and pathos. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter comes from another pair of filmmaking brothers, David and Nathan Zellner, who've crafted a beautifully funny-sad portrait of isolation and depression that starts in Japan and eventually makes its way to frigid Minnesota, a place that even the locals suggest Kumiko would be better off not visiting during her chosen time of year. She may attempt to step into the world of Fargo, but it isn't just a movie for Kumiko — it's a set of clues to be decoded, a map to a new, magical life.
And Kumiko is in dire need of one, because her real life has become a quiet tragedy. She lives in a cramped Tokyo apartment with her scene-stealing rabbit, Bunzo, and works a demeaning dead-end job as a secretary, making tea for a condescending boss who wants to know why, at 29, she hasn't left yet to get married like most of her office lady peers. Her mother calls her to also insist she either wed or come home, not reading how far from either of those things her daughter actually is.
Kumiko is increasingly alienated from the world around her, drifting further and further away from a "normal" timeline, disconnecting from the few people in her life rather than facing their scrutiny. At night, looking out her window at a nearby apartment block, she watches a couple dancing in their own home — the combination of intrusiveness and solitude neatly sums up what it's like to feel alone in the middle of a crowded city.
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