Life is a thousand shades of muted beige for the titular lost soul of director David Zellner’s deftly-crafted idiosyncratic search for meaning Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter.
Trapped in a dead end job working as an Office Lady, well past the age of 25 when most of these women either marry and leave the workforce, or move on to other positions, Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is clearly manifestly dissatisfied with every aspect of her insular, suffocatingly small “l” life.
Unlike the sea of fellow commuters who surge around her in varying shades of grey and black, Kumiko wears a candy apple red coat everywhere, a visible sign that she doesn’t want to be like everyone else, nor live their predictable, unsurprising lives.
This is made abundantly clear when her boss Mr. Sakagami (Nobuyuki Katsube), who spends his days drinking tea and staring out the window like a bored little boy, queries why she isn’t following in the footsteps of everyone else and forging a career or getting married.
It’s clear that the latter option is the one he expects most, if not all, women in his employ to take, and Kumiko, whose facial expressions never rise beyond sullen or dour, makes it clear in her painfully careful manner, where every word is uttered slowly and deliberately like their expression is the result of pain beyond human endurance, that she has no wish to follow the well-beaten path.
Her boss is non-plussed by her unorthodox response, as is her domineering mother whose every phone call inevitably turns to haranguing her beleaguered daughter about her palpable lack of a boyfriend or husband, children and a stable career.
Kumiko then is the ultimate outsider – ostracised by choice and circumstance from her peers, her boss, her friends – such as they are; the only one that makes an appearance, an unaccountably effusive Michi (Kanako Higashi) is dispensed with almost as quickly as she arrives after an absence of some years – adrift in her job, her love life, in fact her entire existence.
The only sense that there is something percolating away beneath her passive countenance are the odd moments of wilful defiance such as when she stuffs her boss’s suits, rather forcefully, into a bin on the street or when she is home alone, avidly watching the Coen brothers 1996 iconic tragedy-thriller, Fargo, which she believes to be a true story.
Convinced that the briefcase full of money buried by Steve Buscemi’s character Carl Showalter is still there waiting to be dug up in the remote surrounds of wintery Minnesota, she takes pages and pages of notes on where the money is most likely hidden, even going so far as to stitch a treasure map in calico.
Unwilling to hear that the story isn’t real, that it’s only “entertainment” as the kindly, somewhat bumbling sheriff who tries to help her, Robert (Nathan Zellner who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother David) tries to make clear to her, she obsessively plows on towards her delusional goal, convinced that therein lies hope for a better, more fulfilling life.
Based on a true tale of a Japanese tourist who similarly believed Fargo to be a factual documentary rather than cinematic fiction and died trying to locate Carl’s buried fortune, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter is a quirky recounting of what happens when the need to believe life is much more than it appears to be, that there are “important” things that need to be done and can only be done by you, overrides any sense of logic or common sense.
And make no mistake about it, Kumiko is not in a logical state of mind, eschewing the aid of a helpful, talkative older lady who saves her from freezing on the highway (Shirley Venard), the sheriff who buys her warmer clothes and tries to help her without much success and pretty much everyone else with whom she comes into contact.
While you might assume that watching an almost expressionless, delusional woman go on the sort of quest of which Don Quixote might approve would not make fixating viewing, the Zellners and Kikuchi manage to gift Kumiko with an eminently relatable sense of raw, poignant, almost desperate humanity.
There is something endearing about her obsessive need to find the non-existent money, to prove to everyone she knows, most touchingly her mother whose rejection clearly stings at every turn, that she is worth something, that her life has meaning even if it bears no resemblance to those of her conformity-embracing contemporaries.
Anyone who has ever felt a sense of alienation from the status quo, a gnawing sensation that life isn’t quite what they expected it to be and is eating them alive as a result, will relate to Kumiko whose isolation from the prevalent orthodoxy around her is beautifully represented by the stunning cinematography of Sean Porter who takes every chance to show her alone against monumentally large backdrops, whether it’s Tokyo or the snowy surrounds of her ill-conceived promised land in Minnesota.
Pleasingly the ending is deliberately ambiguous although events leading up to it, and the appearance of a furry cast member, her pet rabbit Bunzo, suggest that an ill fate may have befallen the tenacious but quixotic Kumiko.
At the end it matters not whether she reaches her goal, so much as she tried to get there; the lesson seems to be that it is better to have failed while trying valiantly than to have never tried at all.
But it’s also made clear that this triumph of bucking the overarching social trends comes at a great cost on many levels, and it is left to you, as you once again watch Kumiko disappear doggedly into the snowy distance, to decide whether the prize, whatever it may be, is really worth all that intense, life-changing effort.