June 4

Day 4

So the June Swoon film for the day is Rental Family, a film featuring Brendan Fraser. It was one that I thought about going to the theater to see, but it did not work out. I decided that I would save this one for June Swoon.

According to IMDB, “An American actor in Tokyo struggling to find purpose lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese “rental family” agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers. He rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the beauty of human connection.”

I am torn on this movie. Not because I did not enjoy it, because this was a beautiful movie filled with emotion and lovely exteriors and great performances. The problem I had was with the central concept of the idea of rental family, not the movie but the business that Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira) was running. He would send actors into situations to play relatives or friends or whatever to people who are emotionally challenged.

For example, in this film, Brendan Fraser played an actor named Phillip who was struggling with his career. He moved to Japan several years before and he joined in the company where he is sent into a situation where he was pretending to be the absentee father of a little girl, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman). He was hired by her mother to help her get into a specific school.

The problem is they do not tell Mia that he is pretending and they pretend that he is her long, lost father, and they told Phillip that he needed to not get close to her. How is he supposed to do that, get to know her and not get close to her.

It just felt gross. I felt that these characters were so emotionally manipulated in this that it, as I said, felt gross.

However, so much of the movie is so wonderful that I kind of held my nose and moved along. To be fair, I think that it is gross is meant to be part of the themes of the film.

There is another storyline where Phillip is pretending to be a journalist interviewing a big time former actor Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto) which was a beautiful tale of friendship and life.

I loved the relationships Phillip developed with both Mia and Kikuo, which made his constant lies all the harder to watch. You can tell from Fraser’s excellent performance how the lies were affecting him as well.

While I had trouble with the concept of the film, everything else was amazing. I loved the story, the characters, the performances, the relationships and the chorography. Rental Family was an outstanding movie that made me feel icky at a few times.