Family Romance, LLC

London Film Festival review #5

This documentary from the prolific Werner Herzog (his first made in Japan) follows Yuichi Ishii, a man who owns a small company called Family Romance, which supplies a rather unusual service: impersonation. The main part of the film concerns Ishii pretending to be a 12-year-old girl’s long-estranged father, but we also see him undertaking a variety of odd roles for other clients.

Despite the overall strangeness of the situations presented here, what makes this film worthwhile is not so much the laughs that it generates along the way, but the fact that it is also very moving. Ishii seems to be a well-intentioned man who wants to bring a little happiness into these lonely lives, but at times it becomes difficult for him not to become personally involved, and he clearly has doubts about continuing. 

Japan gives Herzog plenty to play with visually, and he wisely keeps himself completely off camera for a change, not even providing narration, but letting his subjects speak for themselves. As some of the people filmed are supposedly unaware of the reality of the situation but are co-operating with a film crew, this does raise the question of how much of what we see is genuinely spontaneous, and it seems that most (if not all) of the scenes featured are staged re-enactments. However, what matters more is that Herzog has made one of his most affecting and least self-indulgent films, and probably his best since Grizzly Man. Having said that, the director does characteristically linger on a shot of some robotic fish for what seems a very long time.