Stranger than fiction: Family Romance LLC

My Mirror column:

Werner Herzog's new film takes inspiration from a real Japanese company that lets you hire an actor to play your spouse, your father – or even yourself.

A still from Werner Herzog's latest film, the faux-documentary Family Romance LLC

In 2010, a man called Takeshi Kuwabara was sentenced to 15 years in prison for strangling his lover Rie Isohata. A sad but standard crime of passion, you might think – an affair gone sour. But what made the case unique was that Kuwabara worked as a wakaresaseya – a professional agent that Isohata’s husband had hired to seduce his wife. When Isohata found out that her ‘lover’ was a paid impersonator, she wanted to end the relationship. But by then Kuwabara, a married man who had originally only met Isohata to provide his client evidence for a divorce, had become so emotionally involved in their affair that he didn’t want to let her go. The pretend lover had fallen in love for real – but the person who’d been seduced by pretend-love was now angry and betrayed.

A 2020 article suggests that there are about 270 Japanese agencies advertising wakaresaseya services online. The mind boggles at the thought of the number of staged affairs being conducted – and assuming that most agents don’t go the Kuwabara way, the thousands of people who must be currently being seduced by a hired performance.

The German auteur Werner Herzog’s latest film, which released on an international online platform last month, is about a similar service with a more benign intent: a company called Family Romance, with a staff of 800 actors that you can hire to play the role of a spouse, a family member or friend, in real life. Family Romance LLC is entirely scripted and staged, as the filmmaker clarifies in a post-film conversation also available on the platform. But Herzog, being Herzog, casts the company’s real owner – a gentle, personable man called Ishii Yuichi – as himself, and shoots the film as if it’s a documentary. Just as with the relationships that are the film’s subject, the real and the performed flow in and out of each other.

One woman, for instance, hires Ishii to pretend to be her husband at her daughter’s wedding, telling him that the husband is too ill to attend. But when Ishii goes across to meet the daughter, she whispers to him that her mother isn’t telling the whole truth: the real reason her father can’t attend her wedding is that he’s an alcoholic. The woman is hiring a paid performer to enact a social function – but she also feels compelled to perform for him, since he is part of the same social world that makes her anxious.

Among Ishii’s most innocuous yet moving assignments involves replicating a real event. An ageing woman tells him that winning a lottery was the single happiest moment of her life, making her addicted to buying lottery tickets. But the chances of another win are so low that she pays Ishii to reproduce that experience for her – including the crucial element of surprise. As the fake-notification charade unfolds, and you watch the woman beam happily, you cannot help but wonder – how much do we conspire in our own deceptions? Even when we aren’t actually hiring actors to fool us, the willing suspension of disbelief lies at the heart of a lot of human happiness.

In another episode – which Herzog shoots guerrilla-style on a platform for the Bullet Train that the Indian government is so keen to replicate – Ishii takes the place of a train company salaryman who has goofed up by letting the train depart before time. He kneels and bows and falls to the ground, apologising profusely while his client’s boss yells at him.

Things get more complex when the performance is aimed at someone who doesn’t know it’s an act. The film’s most consistent relationship is between Ishii and a 12-year-old girl called Mahiro, whose single mother has hired him to pretend to be her long-lost husband, who left when Mahiro was a child. The shy Mahiro gradually opens up, becoming truly close to Ishii. Among the ways she expresses that closeness is by showing him Instagram pictures of herself. In one, she’s doing yoga on a beach she says is Bali – but her mother later tells Ishii that it’s a local beach, and that she’s never been to Bali. Herzog uses this instance, as well as that of a woman who wants to go viral on social media with a video that 'documents' fake paparazzi stalking her, to point to the degree of performance that our lived realities now accommodate, even encourage. The camera, of course, is crucial to this constant staging of reality. “Mahiro wanted to show her father that her life was interesting,” muses Herzog’s Ishii. “We’re both lying to each other and that’s that.”

Herzog’s film is full of fictions that start to feel real to someone, even when they know it's a performance. But the lines can get even blurrier in real life. Mahiro is an actor Herzog hired. But in a 2017 interview with Roc Morin, who brought the idea to Herzog and is the film's producer, the real Ishii Yuichi confesses that there is a real young woman whom he has been meeting for eight years – as her pretend-father. What would happen if she learnt he isn't really her father, asks Morin. “I think she would be shocked. If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely.”

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 Aug 2020.