Family Romance, LLC Is Business of the 21st Century
This story was first published in Coronadiet’s old site on July 4, 2020.
Werner Herzog’s latest narrative feature film, Family Romance, LLC (2019), is unsurprisingly a fictional drama that borderlines documentary filmmaking. As much as Family Romance and its premise seem to belong to an alternate reality, the Japanese company was founded and continues to be managed by Yuichi Ishii who plays himself in the film. It’s expected from Herzog as the German director is known for his seamless overlap of these two storytelling modes, but Family Romance, LLC is almost disturbingly unusual for the modern viewer delving into the German director’s filmography for the first time.
From the start, Ishii’s career establishes him as a real life actor of sorts. He holds onto this idealistic role throughout the film, hiring employees who, yet again, are actors within the film. While their performative mannerisms are fake and staged, Family Romance as a collective establishes layers of reality that reveal an undeniable truth about humanity. Enter Herzog’s unobtrusive camera, filling in multiple roles to serve this purpose. It maneuvers around the difficulty of obtaining shooting permits in Tokyo and also provides Herzog with the liberation to capture raw scenes that are pure happenstance.
When so much of our lives has taken on a performative nature, an out-of-body experience is required to learn more about ourselves. From a bullet train operator hiring Ishii to shoulder the blame for a miscalculated schedule to a woman doing the same in hopes of reliving the elation of winning a lottery prize, Herzog optimistically conveys performance and artificiality as a benign element for human survival. Even so, renting out people to stand in for the most important individuals missing from one’s life has inevitably led to a more mechanized future where it’s acceptable to have robots serving as companions. Such a scene sounds futuristic and dystopian, but it’s not so far off as seen with the film’s real robot hotel in Japan functioning on human-like receptionists that stand before machine fish swimming mindlessly in water tanks. As Herzog anticipated, this transformation has been initiated on a global scale with the 21st century increasingly turning into a century of solitude. More frighteningly, it will become a century of existential solitude.
