Hikari’s second feature takes a strange, real Tokyo trade and Brendan Fraser at his gentlest and makes something soft, well acted and pleasant that will not touch the hard questions its own premise keeps asking. Fraser and the young Shannon Mahina Gorman nearly carry it anyway.
Rental family agencies exist in Japan. For a fee, somebody will come to your wedding as your cousin, sit at your father’s funeral, or wait at the school gates as the parent you do not have. Hikari’s second feature, which she wrote with Stephen Blahut, gives one of these jobs to Brendan Fraser and follows him from assignment to assignment for 110 minutes. The idea is odd, true and full of trouble. The film is kind, soft and untroubled, and it is easy to sit through. We wanted it to be harder.
Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor who has been in Tokyo long enough to speak the language and not long enough to have a life there. He is big and careful and ducks slightly through doorways as if apologising to them, and he is the reason the film works as often as it does. He does not push. When a client cries he lets them, and the camera stays on his face while he works out whether he is allowed to feel anything himself. It is a quieter performance than The Whale (2022) and a better one.
The work comes from an agency run by Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira), with Aiko Nakajima (Mari Yamamoto) as the colleague who has been doing this longer and likes it less. Two jobs carry the film. Phillip is hired as a father for Mia Kawasaki (Shannon Mahina Gorman) and as a visitor for Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), an old actor with an audience of one. Gorman is the find. She plays the girl as a child who has worked out more about the arrangement than the adults believe and has decided to go along with it, and there is a scene between her and Fraser, early on, in which nothing is said that could not be said in front of a paying customer and both of them know it. It moved us more than we expected, because Fraser plays it with his hands in his lap, like a man waiting for permission. Emoto gets the film’s driest comedy, treating his hired guest as a crowd that has finally turned up.
Takuro Ishizaka shoots Tokyo in soft light, pastel more than neon, and keeps Phillip’s flat tight enough that his shoulders fill the frame and the walls look too close for him. Masako Takayama and Norihiro Isoda make the agency a cluttered little office with costumes on rails and photographs of other people’s relatives on the walls. Meg Mochizuki dresses Phillip in the same few soft shirts off duty and something stiffer for each job, so we can always tell when he is working. Thomas A. Krueger and Alan Baumgarten cut the assignments as a string of short episodes, each with a set-up and a small landing, which keeps the film moving and stops it settling anywhere long enough to hurt.
The score is where the film’s nerve first goes. Jon Thor Birgisson and Alex Somers supply hummed voices and slow strings that rise under nearly every quiet moment, and whenever Fraser has done the work with his face the music arrives to do it again. By the hour mark we were bracing for it, and then we were irritated, because the scenes did not need the help.
People are lied to in this film, some of them old and one of them a child, and the film treats the lies as a kindness because the liar is Brendan Fraser. Hikari and Blahut know the objection is there; they give it one scene and then put it away. The Japanese characters mostly exist to be helped by him. Hira and Yamamoto are good, and each gets a moment that suggests a life of their own before the script goes back to arranging Phillip’s. The last stretch tidies every complication, and we will say only that nobody is asked to pay for anything.
Hikari’s 37 Seconds (2019) let its heroine be angry and wrong and stay likeable. Nobody here is allowed to be either. Every client is deserving, every deception is forgiven before it is discovered, and a premise about the price of company ends up costing no one very much.
It runs 110 minutes and carries a 12A, and there is nothing in it that could upset anybody, which is the problem. See it if a gentle evening is what you need; Fraser and Gorman will give you one. A film about a man paid to lie to lonely people ought to have found the lying at least a little interesting.
