LOST FOUND

Rinko Kikuchi searches for Fargo’s missing millions in Kumiko, while Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds aim to reclaim a Klimt in Woman in Gold

Perhaps you’ve heard this one. In 2001, a 29-year-old female office worker from Tokyo, Takako Konishi, was found dead in a field near Fargo, N.D. She’d come looking for the treasure buried in a field by Steve Buscemi’s character in Fargo, the 1996 Coens brothers movie that begins: “This is a true story.”

Fargo isn’t a true story, and neither is the tale of Konishi. A 2003 documentary by Paul Berczeller tells how she was depressed and probably decided to end her life in a place that reminded her of a former lover from America. Urban legends, however, live longer than logic.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, is based on the myth, and director and co-writer David Zellner cleaves to the mythic. In the opening scene, Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) finds a VHS tape buried in a cave. Dressed in a red riding hood, she re- sembles a fairytale heroine; later, kitted out in a tattered blanket, a certain samurai similarity can be seen.

Kumiko works as an “office lady,” although as her mother and boss keep reminding her, 29 is far too old for anything but starting a family. Slovenly and surly, she is barely responsive to even the simplest requests made of her at work.

At home, it’s a different story. With only her bunny, Bunzo, for company, she scans her tape of Fargo so obsessively that it’s become stretched, full of static, its soundtrack warped and warbling. By calculating the distance between fence posts using Buscemi as a ruler (69 inches = 1 Buscemi) and through other clues, Kumiko figures she knows where the money is.

Comparing herself to a Spanish Conquistador, she comprises an odd mix of ingenuity and foolishness. Visiting the library to steal a map of the Fargo area from an atlas, she’s caught. The guard wants to know why she didn’t just make a photocopy; her answer is “I’m willing to make it worth your while,” accompanied by a pathetic handful of change. In the end, he rips out the page and hands it over just to be rid of her.

The film is full of such wonky moments and snatches of dark humour, especially in the second half, once Kumiko has stolen her boss’s credit card — he may be complicit, also wanting to see the last of her — and hightailed it to Minneapolis, a mere 400 kms from Fargo.

Travelling through Minnesota with a needlepoint treasure map and a meagre command of English, she comes across such well-meaning simple folk as a bus driver with carpal tunnel, a deaf taxi driver and a retiree who looks like Marge Gunderson’s second cousin, and who asks if she’s ever read Shogun by James Clavell.

Two of the more memorable characters are the tourism/religious information clerk, played by Zellner’s cowriter and brother Nathan, and the cop, played by Zellner himself, who takes Kumiko to a Chinese restaurant in search of a translator. When the restaurant proprietor patiently explains that she doesn’t speak Japanese, they stay on for dim sum.

Local colour aside, Kikuchi is the film’s make-or-break fulcrum, and she is perfect in the role, completely unselfconscious and fully believable as the sheltered, Cervantean conquistador. Her blank stares at the Minnesotans belie the fact that the actress speaks flawless English, in Pacific Rim and elsewhere.

It’s an unforgiving role, for it amounts to a buttress, propping up the film’s recursive efforts to tell us a story about the stories we tell ourselves, and about the impossibility of ever fully realizing any desire that’s rooted in fiction; and aren’t they all? Fargo begets a farce, which turns out to be fiction, but the very real death inspires a new cycle of makebelieve. Is it any wonder the film’s closing scene may make you want to both laugh and weep?

Meanwhile, The Treasure Hunter’s cavalcade of characters will do nothing to rescue this part of the world from the cliché, perpetrated so lovingly in Fargo before it, of being a home to kindly misfits and oddballs. Though that’s just a fiction; at least, I think it is. Someone should really go out there and check. ΩΩΩΩ