“Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter”

The first image of David Zellner’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is not its own. Rather, it is the opening text—a wry “true story” disclaimer filtered through the fuzzy distortion of a worn VHS—from the Coen brothers’ Fargo. The analog snow and intense tracking, as well as the sine wave fluctuations of the soundtrack, immediately expose the Coens’ cheeky fib, exaggerating the artifacts to clearly delineate reality from fiction.

Unfortunately, it is a lesson lost on Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi), who discovers the waterlogged videocassette while out for a walk, hidden under a rock as if it were a swiftly hidden treasure map. She returns to her cramped, messy Tokyo apartment to watch the tape, and, after viewing the scene where Steve Buscemi’s character hides a satchel of money on the side of a road, she promptly becomes obsessed with traveling to the Midwest to find the cash.

Like Fargo, Zellner’s film is based on a true story that likely never happened, as it’s inspired by an urban legend that cropped up when a Tokyo woman was found dead in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Zellner, along with his brother Nathan, honors the reality of the woman’s depression by filtering it through the fantasy of her purported obsession with the fictitious stash. The film’s first half unfurls in Kumiko’s native Tokyo, which feels a lot like procedural purgatory. She works a dead-end administrative office job and suffers the regular exploitation of her piggish boss and the hectoring phone calls of her mother. Kikuchi’s gift for muted expression gives her one of the great Kuleshov faces of our time. Her withdrawn performance toes the line between the pure misery of the everyday discomforts of having a shitty boss or seeing old friends now living successful lives, and a droll, deadpan reaction to it.

Appropriately for a film whose subject matter relates to Fargo, Kumiko adopts some of the Coen brothers’ sense of humor, although it looks more to the cosmic bleakness of Barton Fink and A Serious Man than the movie at the heart of the narrative. In isolation, Kumiko displays this chilled wit best in a scene where she must ditch the only thing precious to her before leaving for America: her pet bunny, Bunzo. She attempts to set him free in a park but he won’t leave, leading to a clichéd smash cut to the two seemingly reconciled. Instead of resolving to take Bunzo with her, however, she finds a more inventive way to force a separation in what is simultaneously the film’s most heartrending and darkly comic moment.

Yet for a film so keyed into its protagonist’s emotional solitude, Kumiko only comes into its own when Kumiko arrives in Minnesota and must deal with locals as she heads up to Fargo despite knowing very little English. The Coen brothers parodied the effusive hospitality of small-town yokels, but this film wrings more naturalistic humor from decent people attempting to make some connection with the Japanese fish out of water. A widow (Shirley Vernard) takes her back to her place and awkwardly offers her deceased husband’s copy of Shogun as a gift, while a pair of tourist information representatives in Minneapolis scramble discussion of geographic and moral directions, talking of being lost in more ways than one as Kumiko looks on, confused. The director plays the most charming supporting role, that of a policeman who tries to communicate to Kumiko that she is chasing after her own imagination. The film is worth watching just for the scene where Kumiko breaks down in a diner and the terrified cop rips every napkin out of a dispenser and shoves them toward her in an attempt to help.

Zellner’s direction, which is mostly static and washed out but for the blazing red cloak that Kumiko wears, conveys the protagonist’s remove from the bright metropolis around her within the Tokyo setting, but it is in the frozen monochrome of Minnesota and North Dakota that the film fully delivers on its mood of ineffable sorrow and quarter-life anomie. The most unsettling aspect of the film’s second half is that it is in the American Midwest—where Kumiko is broke, a stranger, and barely capable of communication—where she truly belongs. Kumiko uses Fargo as a metaphor for its protagonist’s desperate desire to find some purpose, or to at least gain enough money that she can financially defend her lack of definition. But it is the displacement of this new setting, naturally inhospitable but made welcoming by those who live in it, where the film truly expresses the self-realization of depression, in which one finds that the best fit may be a place where one doesn’t fit at all.