Review: ‘Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’

Based on an urban legend about a lady who froze to death looking for the money buried in the snow in the 1996 Coen Brothers’ movie “Fargo” and centered on a fantastic performance in a sweet but ultimately sad movie, “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” is a great movie about loneliness, ambition and not believing everything you read or see.

Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, Pacific Rim) is a depressed 30-something year old living in Japan, working a menial job for an obnoxious boss, living by herself and generally being very unhappy. Her coworkers insult her, her mother berates her for not being married, and she just has a shit life at this point. So when she comes across an old, damaged VHS copy of “Fargo,” she watches it and takes solace from it. As a matter of fact she sees the text at the beginning of the movie claiming it was based on a true story (which it was not), so she decides that she needs to go to Fargo, North Dakota to find the suitcase of money buried in the snow by one of that film’s characters. She watches this money burying scene over and over in order to gather clues as to its exact whereabouts and so she can make a map of the area to help her find the buried loot. And finally she sets out of her conquest, hustling her way to North Dakota so she can become rich.

The problem with Kumiko is that she is a lonely girl, with no friends, and she may even be suffering from some sort of mental illness. As a result, she has no one to tell her that “Fargo” is just a movie and the money does not exist, so she embarks on her trip very ill-prepared for what’s in store for her. She has very little money, speaks pretty much no English and doesn’t seem fully prepared for the harsh wintery conditions of the northern states of this country. None of that matters to Kumiko, though, because she sees herself as a Spanish Conquistador, traveling through a new land to find amazing treasures, and really we would be laughing at her misplaced sense of purpose if it wasn’t all so sad.

You see, “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” surely has some comedy in it – hell, there is apparently nothing cuter or funnier than watching a bunny eat noodles – but when it is all said and done, Kumiko is a tragic figure, one who was stuck in a rut that she couldn’t escape from without doing something incredibly drastic, and she has no one to relate to and no one understands her or what she is going through, so instead she finds solace in the warped and garbled mess of her waterlogged VHS copy of “Fargo.” And there is something very haunting and sad about how she watches the same scenes in “Fargo” over and over, with the soundtrack all screwed up and weird sounding, Steve Buscemi barely visible between the static and messed up tracking (remember VHS tracking? If so, then you are OLD). This girl sits in her apartment by herself watching this mess and imagining that it somehow has something for her that would make her life worthwhile and that is a bummer.

This movie explores an interesting theme, which is how we as people are shaped by our media and what we take in culturally. Kumiko found the VHS tape wrapped up and buried in a cave on a beach somewhere, and she comes across it like a talisman, or even like one of the black monoliths from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” because when she finds it, it changes her. If she had not seen this movie, she would not have come up with her idea, and who knows what she would have done instead. Probably just eventually kill herself outright, or just move back in with her mother and remain a recluse. But she does find the tape, she does watch the movie, and her life is forever altered. She acts upon this art and allows it to change who she is; it gives her the opportunity to see herself in a different way, and to have an actual goal to work towards, and for many people, art does this all the time. Whether it is a movie or a television show or a song or a painting or a book, people are constantly influenced by the artistic expressions of others, even in ways that were wholly unintended by the arts’ creators.

Ultimately though this movie is all about loneliness, that crushing loneliness that people feel sometimes and which seems to be a suffocating blanket that they can’t get out from under. When Kumiko is home in Japan she is alone and when she goes to America, she is alone. Even when she meets some nice locals who try to help her as best as they can, they don’t understand her literally because of the language barrier but they also don’t understand her motivations, her desire to go to Fargo, why she is on the journey to begin with, and even then in the face of friendliness Kumiko finds only alienation. The only time this gets cast aside for her is during the very brief time when she thinks someone being nice to her could lead to something more…romantic. And when that doesn’t happen, it just drives her further down the path of loneliness, where she has to fend for herself.

Both funny and sad, “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” is a lovely movie, the kind of film that could only be made by people with a real clarity of vision, folks who knew the exact kind of movie they wanted to make and went ahead and made it, commercial prospects and wide releases be damned. Pulling influence from another movie and a real life story, the filmmakers synthesized those influences into a wholly original film, and a beautiful one at that.