Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter opens on a young woman walking along a beach in Japan. Her face set and determined, she heads directly into a cave, digs in the sand and pulls out a video cassette wrapped in a cloth, as if it were waiting for her.
What she's unearthed happens to be the Coen brothers' Fargo, which opens with the statement that the story is true. Kumiko, who stays grimly unexpressive much of the time, apparently believes this claim, especially the part where Steve Buscemi's character, smeared in blood, stashes a case packed with money in the snow.
Kumiko draws herself a map, which she believes is accurate, and she sets off for Minnesota and North Dakota.
From this description, you might think that Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter is a dopey intentional joke like The Blair Witch Project, or maybe either a student film or another amateur go at silly humor. It is none of these. Director David Zellner is over 21 and he's made a number of films before this one, often with his film partner and brother Nathan Zellner. The actress Rinko Kikuchi, has been in a fair number of pictures, and in 2007 was nominated for an Oscar for best actress in Babel, by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Zellner plays the movie completely deadpan, so it comes off as genuinely strange and inexplicable. It's hard to tell where to put it in your mind. To mangle the ideas of the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter takes more than a normal suspension of disbelief.
Kumiko is depressed. She plods through her job as a personal assistant to an executive. She endures her mother's endless questions about 'does she have a boyfriend' or 'when is she going to move home?'
Then she flies to Minnesota following her belief that the movie Fargo and her map will soon lead her to great riches. Once she gets to America, it feels like Kumiko has entered a hallucinatory state of hyper reality. A mark of the film's smart self-control is that it never descends into camp. The sights of Kumiko in the Mall of America, eating tuna noodle casserole or standing by the huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox make your jaw drop.
Kumiko is a kind of unstoppable force. She's taken in by an older woman who exudes the type of smothering kindliness that drives Kumiko to sneak out a window in the middle of the night. She walks along snowy roads in her red parka and the movie looks as if there's no real geography to the world at all. There's simply the vast white undifferentiated emptiness with this figure in red plodding through it, irrationally certain of her direction and her reason for being there.
It's astonishing.
What makes the film not just a campy mess is the director's discipline. The film never breaks its façade or cracks a smile. It's as straight and determined as Kumiko. Even though it's clear that some kind of madness has settled in, Kumiko draws your care and attention. Her world in Tokyo is full of rigid lines and stiff geometric patterns. There's no relief from the rigidity until she becomes that solitary presence in the vast flatness of Minnesota.
That image then grows stranger. Kumiko takes a bedspread from a motel – it's bulky and a grotesque cheap motel-gold in color. It makes Kumiko into a bigger, inexplicable presence, a gold-ish triangle gliding along madly and inexorably. Her form no longer looks human; it's pure eccentricity with mind-boggling purpose and a direction only it seems to understand.
How this all ends, I will not say.
