Family Romance, LLC. (2019, Werner Herzog) (Patreon)

45/100

Between this and Alps, I'm ready to conclude that rent-an-impostor just doesn't work as a dramatic premise, even though Herzog was (loosely) inspired here by a real-world Japanese service. Sometimes the logistics trip me up: When a bullet-train employee due for a tongue-lashing hires Ishii to receive it on his behalf, are we meant to assume that the boss listened to Ishii's pitch and said, "Sure, I'll yell at you instead, so long as my dude's in earshot”? Or was the boss also an actor? (The latter scenario would not seem to solve the problem, unless it's just "practice.") Often, Family Romance's ostensible skillset seems irrelevant—all that aspiring starlet really needed, for example, was six random dudes to follow her around with cameras, no impersonation necessary. (I guess maybe securing multiple cameras that aren't also cellphones would be the tricky part. But prop rental isn't the business model we're intrigued by.) Mostly, though—and this may just be me, given that Ishii actually runs a similar company and hence presumably has plenty of customers—I simply can't fathom the emotional appeal of a stand-in, which neither Lanthimos nor Herzog manages to make seem psychologically credible. Family Romance isn't as bizarre as Alps (though the woman who wants to relive her big lottery win, knowing perfectly well that the new check is phony, feels very Yorgos); there's some empathy, at least, in watching Mahiro gradually emerge from her shell in response to Ishii's warm attention. But does it really even matter that he's claiming to be her father? (Does she know that he isn't her father? As far as I can tell, that's left ambiguous, but it kinda makes a huge difference, not least in terms of ethical ramifications.) Wouldn't a movie about a 12-year-old girl bonding with her new stepdad hit most of the same beats, minus Ishii's climactic (and thoroughly unconvincing) existential crisis? A proper actor might have been better equipped to pull that off, thereby providing the movie with some genuine pathos, but he'd still have been fighting Herzog's ADD; the barely relevant sequence at the robot hotel, featuring those weirdly gorgeous mechanical fish (which I would absolutely buy a tank full of, were I wealthy), made me wish that I were watching one of his Lo and Behold-style hodgepodge docs instead. Those are admirably honest about their incoherence.