Jay Reviews David Zellner's "Kumiko the Treasure Hunter"

Jay here.

If you watch the opening of the Joel and Ethan Coen's classic crime drama, Fargo, you are greeted with these words:

"This is a TRUE STORY. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.At the request of the survivors the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred."

For years some folks who have watched the 1996 dark comedy have taken this comment as gospel. There've been plenty of true crime stories turned into feature length films. But, if you are under any illusion that the Coen's had somehow found this outlandish story in a newspaper or something, well you would be wrong. Fargo is purely a fictional tale. There is no truth to it, though many have been fooled.

One such person who becomes fooled by this notion is the main character of David Zellner's new film, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter. The title character, played with quiet intensity by Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, The Brothers Bloom) is a young misanthropic and introverted Japanese office worker living in Tokyo. When the film opens we see Kumiko discovering a buried chest that contains a waterlogged copy of Fargo on VHS cassette. She takes the tape home and watches it, even though the image is heavily distorted, and is fully convinced that what she is watching actually happened.

Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) lives a solitary life with only her rabbit, Bunzo, to relate to. Poor, poor, Bunzo .....

Fed up with her mundane job and becoming more and more lost in her daydreams of wintery Minnesota, Kumiko steals her boss's credit card and hops on a plane to America, determined to track down the buried case of cash that Steve Buscemi's character buried in the snow near the end of the movie. She studies the fence line that borders where Buscemi covered the ransom with snow and an ice scraper, measuring out meticulously post to post, even creating a cross-stitch map to help her indentify the spot.

Once our heroine makes it to Minneapolis she begins the arduous trek across the frozen, snowy landscape of modern-day Minnesota, meeting various natives who mostly try to help her in her stubborn quest to get to Fargo and find the treasure that we all know is not there. She meets a friendly local woman who tries to educate her on the brilliance of James Claville's novel, Shogun and also a helpful deputy (played by the director himself) who wants to make sure she is taken care of, while also trying to convince her that the film she's been watching is fiction.

A caring deputy (David Zellner) tries to help Kumiko and convince her that the Coen Brothers' masterpiece is not, in fact, a true story. She's not buying what he's selling.

I had heard about this movie months before it finally was released at the Ken Theater here in San Diego (named for the Kensington neighborhood it can found in), so I was excited to see it. The premise is an interesting one, and I was intrigued to see an American filmmaker take on story that was so grounded in Japanese culture. The entire first third of the movie takes place in Kumiko's native country and it feels authentic. It's a modern-day Japan, but seen through the young woman's eyes it feels hollow and empty and not to be trusted.

Kumiko the Treasure Hunter definitely surprised me. I went in anticipating a quirky and darkly comical tale on par with a film like Fargo itself, and it does give you that at times. But, overall, what I got was a much more somber story that was less funny but honestly more depressing. One scene where Kumiko has to decide what to do with her pet bunny, Bunzo, before leaving on her flight was particularly depressing to me. I guess nothing gets to us like when bad things happen to pets in movies, huh?

Kumiko finds herself in the dead of winter in northern Minnesota.

Kumiko is a lost soul stuck in a life without purpose. She latches on to this identity of being an adventurer looking for lost gold, or as she calls herself "a Spanish Conquistador". But there is no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. I won't spoil the ending but I will say it ended the only way it really could.

Overall, I didn't think Kumiko the Treasure Hunter was a waste of money, but it certainly didn't wow me. Part of that could be chalked up to my expectations of what kind of movie it would be.  It's possible I judge it unfairly based on misconceived notions, but all I will say is you have to be in the mood for a much more maudlin film about a young woman, lost in the doldrums of everyday life, who latches onto a fantasy she cannot let go of.