Sundance London 2014 Review – Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014)

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, 2014

Directed by David Zellner
Starring Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, David Zellner, Kanako Higashi

SYNOPSIS:

A lonely Japanese woman becomes convinced that a satchel of money buried and lost in a fictional film, is in fact, real. With a crudely drawn treasure map and limited preparation, she escapes her structured life in Tokyo and embarks on a foolhardy quest across the frozen tundra of Minnesota in search of her mythical fortune.

Have you ever been so bored with life that you find solace in a movie to the point where you believe everything it tells you? That’s the general conceit of Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. It’s a movie that looks beautiful and is well acted, but unfortunately ends up being a little bit bland and boring.

Pacific Rim‘s Rinko Kikuchi plays the titular Kumiko, a woman who feels that there is absolutely nothing in her life. She works a boring job, she leads a boring life and her apartment is small – and boring. She is also a victim of Old Japan as her boss and mother berate her on a daily basis for being 29 years old and not married or pregnant. However Kumiko does have a form of escape – the 1996 Coen Brothers movie Fargo and, more importantly, its ending. Kumiko spends her evenings going through the movie meticulously to work out where the money is buried so that she may one day unearth it. Then, through getting the credit card of the company she works for, Kumiko finally takes the plunge and flies out to America to see if she can find the “treasure” she seeks.

The Zellners play with the idea of just how far you can take the term “based on a true story”, going as far as to use Fargo‘s own title card to tell the audience that what they are about to watch it indeed “true”. However, while Fargo has no basis in reality and is a complete work of fiction, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter does have some form of realism to it. The story is a re-telling of the tragic tale of Takako Konishi, who was found dead at the side of a Minnesota road in 2001 while looking for Steve Buscemi’s money, in that it takes the general story idea and then takes it down a new path. The idea is very solid and, for a brief moment, is very enjoyable. But the film’s problems rear their ugly head as the plot progresses. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter might be a light-hearted movie, but it’s also very dull.

All the enjoyment in the film can be found in the first half as Kumiko plans and plots her journey to find the buried money. Trying to steal a map of the US from the library and her love of her archaic VHS player are both given the sort of treatment the movie needs, but the movie remarkably falls off a cliff as Kumiko reaches the States. Gone are the whimsical scenes that show just how lost she is in her life and how found she is during her planning of travels, and are instead replaced with typical indie-scenes that feel more like time wasters than genuine plot points to move the story along. In a failed effort to replicate the magic of the Coens, she meets a variety of interesting characters that, had this been a focused road-trip movie, might have been entertaining but they instead just serve as road blocks to Kumiko’s end point. The ending is poetically beautiful, but it’s just too little too late.

Thankfully, Rinko Kikuchi is an utter joy to watch and she perfectly portrays the very lost and introverted Kumiko. She is a woman of few words which becomes a big problem once she reaches America and her shyness towards her boss and mother is incredibly sweet and endearing. There is a wonderful moment before she leaves Tokyo where she is trying to give her pet rabbit Bunko freedom which really makes you warm to her character, which is why it’s such a shame that everything around her is so dry and boring.

There is a good film in Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter – but this isn’t it. A great central performance and interesting character carry the film to a certain point, but the lousy pacing, purposefully slow delivery and dreary tone just make for a really poor experience. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is disappointing to say the least.