There’s an argument to be made that the smartest art casts a light on its own artifice, and Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC is no exception. Taking its title from Yuichi Ishii’s real-life company of the same name, the film casts Ishii as himself and hits you like an uncanny sucker punch – all the more squarely when you realise the reality underpinning its fictional conceit.
ArrayDaddy Daughter Day
A lazy March afternoon in Tokyo’s Yoyogi park. Families and elderly couples, tourists and locals, buzz around the annual surfeit of cherry blossom. Lost in their own private world and waltzing through the public one we all share, a father and daughter amble around the season’s frothy blooms.
Looking at the pair together, it’s easy to imagine that today is one iteration of a yearly ritual…
They take photos of the flowers and of each other. Looking at the pair together, it’s easy to imagine that today is one iteration of a yearly ritual. Maybe they’ll follow the blossom tour with customary ice cream, or a stroll down their favourite street. Such easy intimacy; but hold your horses. That man in his forties and that twelve-year-old girl just met.
Unbeknownst to her, Yuichi Ishii has been hired by Mahiro Tanimoto’s mother to fill a void with which she has contended for most of her life; Mahiro’s father left the family when she was just a baby, and she has no memory of him. For the cautious pre-teen, this petal-dappled meeting is charged with a full childhood’s measure of anger, confusion, fantasy. For seasoned actor Ishii, it’s another day at the office.
ArrayAuthentic Illusion
Hovering somewhere between fiction and documentary, Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC zooms in on the very real Japanese business of hiring actors for one’s personal game of pretend. It zooms out to reveal a universal veil between true-and-untrue, thinner than we’d care to admit. Family Romance LLC is named after Ishii’s real-life company, which presumably operates much like the film suggests: as the director of a rent-a-family agency, Ishii is used to playing diverse roles. With Mahiro, he’s playing a long-lost dad – and, in a metatextual flourish for the history books, Ishii’s playing himself for Werner Herzog.
…this is a man who makes a living from being whoever you need him to be.
With that in mind, it’s not unreasonable to think of Herzog as just another of Ishii’s clients: after all, this is a man who makes a living from being whoever you need him to be. From the train station worker who contracts Ishii to shoulder his bosses’ fury after making a mistake on the job to the woman who commissions Family Romance LLC to restage the minor lottery win which brought her more happiness than she’d ever felt before, Ishii’s masks are as various as the human beings who employ him. The film’s dialogue is largely improvised, with each scene launching from a loose premise into the murky depths of human idiosyncrasies – professionally rentable Ishii must be more than accustomed to thinking on his feet.
The drama of betrayal
Intimate messiness aside, the relationships staged by agencies like Ishii’s read simply and cleanly to outsiders: if there exists a cookie cutter configuration for every interpersonal association, then plugging their holes ought to be as simple as purchasing new parts for a bike. Rent a dad, rent a husband, rent a friend or a funeral mourner – when you move beyond the disquiet of the agency’s premise (people for sale), it’s easy to see Family Romance LLC’s as a very practical service indeed.
At formal events or business parties, who needs to know that your real partner is an alcoholic? Or that your biological mother ran off to Cancun with a lover last year, never to be heard from again? This charming actor will play them better than they could have played themselves! Japanese culture conceives a dichotomy between honne (‘true’, authentic feeling) and tatemae (societally appropriate emotions and actions). By extension, the careful balance of interior and exterior tends to favour harmony and politeness over unfiltered emotion or awkwardness. Read: it is thoughtful, not deceitful, to hire a fake wife to introduce to your new colleagues.
Arguably, it’s that binary between honne and tatemae which underpins the demand for Family Romance LLC’s services in the first place. Even if the idea of buying your way out of social awkwardness feels jarring, the desire to balance perception and identity will be eminently familiar to anyone who’s been alive more than five minutes. Inner and outer worlds are universal, and the tension between them is at the heart of any story worth telling; as Family Romance LLC unfolds, its central drama revolves around the sticky collisions of private and public. Between what we think we want, and what we don’t know we need.
ArrayNuclear Family Facade
On meeting Mahiro, then, there’s a whiff of psychodrama in the air. As a therapeutic technique, psychodrama involves patients acting out traumas or confronting their protagonists in a clinical setting; while Mahiro doesn’t know she’s being presented with a stand-in dad rather than the real thing, part of Ishii’s job is nonetheless to function as a cathartic vessel for her resentment, her intense affection, her adolescent need to belong. Whether the exercise will heal or wound Mahiro in the long term remains to be seen.
As the name shared by film and company suggests, it’s those most human of lines (Family, Romance) beginning to blur which heralds the heartbreak Ishii’s seeking to mend. After all, it’s one thing to draft in a dummy step-dad to appease your in-laws at the wedding – but quite another to offer a father, especially one so dashing and attentive, to a child who’s never had one. As the film marches on, it becomes clear that Ishii has been hired – at least in part – to gain Mahiro’s trust and report back on her secrets; to uncover the honne beneath his fake daughter’s tatemae. If I were pushed to identify where ‘polite’ might slip into ‘life ruining’, it’d be right about there.
If I were pushed to identify where ‘polite’ might slip into ‘life ruining’, it’d be right about there.
Of course, we’ve got to raise Mahiro high before we can watch her tumble. At her first meeting with Ishii, she is guarded; shy, reticent. He persists (per his paternal obligations, contractual or familial as the case may be) – and as Mahiro begins to warm to her prodigal father, he becomes her advocate in his review meetings with her mother. As the unlikely pair grow closer, their relationship begins to look increasingly like the one Ishii’s acting out; only a matter of time before lines are crossed. I sense a threshold approaching.
Paved with good intentions
As all daughters must, Mahiro lies to her father. It’s harmless, really; she wants to impress him, and tells him she’s travelled to Bali when she hasn’t. The untruth comes to light and prompts a little epiphany: “I’m lying to Mahiro, but Mahiro is lying to me”, he realises. As honne and tatemae rub up against each other in earnest, Ishii finds himself painted into a corner. He proposes a plan to end the charade once and for all, which slips from cruel to kind and back again before our eyes.
“You create illusions to make your clients feel better – you should feel good”, says one of Ishii’s colleagues. While the faux-father-daughter configuration might sound terribly specific, Family Romance LLC casts its net wide enough to ask questions all the more chilling for their close-to-the-bone familiarity. Towards the end of the film, we see Ishii suddenly in context – returning home, he approaches his front door. Muffled sounds of family life can be heard, and a child’s hand presses against its glass panel. Rather than turning the key, he slumps to the ground. Present but invisible, he is finally defeated: maskless at last, Ishii is alone where he ought to feel most beloved. The scene cuts before we can ascertain the slump as a breakdown, or just a breather while our protagonist readies himself to play his most nuanced role of all.
ArrayArt mirrors life mirrors art
Familial, social, professional: those veneers and distinctions are only as true as we feel them to be, which makes their maintenance totally crucial. We might not have the words in English, but honne and tatemae hold as strong on this island as they do on Japan’s and in every corner of the world. With that truism in mind, Herzog conjures a kind of understated fable – one which extrapolates very neatly indeed.
Monkey see, monkey do: like cogs in a machine, we need people to play their parts so dearly that we don’t realise we’re asking it of them. By the same logic, we need outsiders to insist on us playing our own in order to maintain a sense of self. Where does one draw identity from, if not other people? Daughter, because of your relationship with your parents. Lover, because of your relationship with your partner. Writer, because of your relationship with colleagues and imagined readers. Even ideas like tall or short only arise through comparison – you can’t very well be ‘big’ without people to be bigger than, now, can you.
What people think of us and what we feel ourselves to be might be wildly divergent, but perception and reality are more often mutually constitutive than exclusive.
Let’s play pretend
What people think of us and what we feel ourselves to be might be wildly divergent, but perception and reality are more often mutually constitutive than exclusive. If you think I’m annoying, then on some level I must be. On the other hand, if you believe I’m successful, you’re likely to treat me that way – and others will too. One client of Family Romance LLC is an aspiring starlet who engages Ishii’s employees as a swarm of paparazzi; the idea seems to be that if she is seen to be desirable and interesting enough to be photographed, then she will become interesting and desirable enough to be photographed. And who could deny that those convenient short-hands are what builds reality? Who could say they live without pretence, self-administered story-telling?
If Ishii lies on demand, to order, then the rest of us do it for free. Of course, some lies are more obvious than others – but it’s a question of degrees, rather than yes-no. The world is full of people who live as entirely different individuals online, plotting digital existences which outgrow their real-world ones. People marry for money rather than love, or hire prostitutes so they can feel wanted for an hour, or expect their waitress to grin ear-to-ear throughout their demanding four course meal.
People are one way at home, another way at work, and someone else entirely among friends; every time you grit your teeth and smile anyway, or nod along with your least favourite uncle, another line is written in that particular person’s account of Who You Are. That’s not to say it isn’t exhausting: “every day, I feel uneasy”, says Ishii. One doesn’t need to run a platonic-escort agency to relate to that sentiment.
