'Rental Family': theater of appearances in a film for all audiences

Among the bitter loneliness of the contemporary world, a new business is making its way: the generation of emotions and, with it, their possible buying and selling. That’s why a small business like this makes so much sense. Rental Family, co-production between Japan and the United States directed by Hikari, which puts into practice what Fernando León de Aranoa had already warned about in 1996 with Family, perhaps his best film: the necessary welcome of the relatives is nothing more than a theater of appearances.

Hikari, a Japanese by birth who was cinematically forged in the United States, where she has lived since her university days, has composed an ode to good family cinema, with its drops of comedy and its well-known bursts of tears, which can equally serve as an apology for the benefits of lineage—for its sentimental, educational and, of course, economic support—as well as as a critical reflection on the fallacy of certain blood relations. Depending on the family that each viewer has, each one will surely bring the ember to their ideological sardine, but the truth is that with its kind, calm and, at times, sharp tone, and through a magnificent set of performances, Hikari achieves a beautiful film of strange warmth.

A single mother who needs a father to get her daughter into an exclusive (and conservative) private school; a middle-aged man in need of affection who buys his own funeral in which to see how his loved ones praise him and cry; an old forgotten actor whose daughter gives him one last interview for a magazine. These are some of the jobs carried out by the company Rental Family, and in which its protagonist, played by Brendan Fraser, comes to work: a mediocre actor who has been (badly) living in Japan for seven years, and who is hired to act as a “sad American.” Loneliness, vulnerabilities, depression. Our contemporary time, wrapped in Eastern spirituality, although always attached to something essentially universal: the search for ourselves.

In addition to that formidable debut by León de Aranoa, a good handful of films have pondered the mirage of the happy family and its ironic reverse: the happy reality of an invented offspring. Whether with the twisted cruelty of Yorgos Lanthimos in Alps, or with the mysterious social delicacy of Kirokazu Kore-eda in Family matter. However, it is with the Spanish film that Rental family finds greater parallels (you should ask Hikari if she has seen it), especially in a couple of final twists that are extremely similar to an emblematic sequence of Family (“With how well everything was going! Look, I didn’t want a fat son!”), and in the coincidence that both filmmakers use a mirror as an essential metaphor for the story.

In Rental Family Everyone lies to everyone else, but the key is that everyone lies to themselves. And in that sense, the final message from Hikari—director of several chapters of Row and of Tokyo Vice, series that merged the western and the eastern. For its communion of, finally, loyalties, and also for its tone as a friendly film for viewers from 9 to 99 years old.

And in that line, in addition to the cast of secondary characters and performers, the excellent work of Fraser is of enormous importance, who, based on his resounding physical changes in body and face since that young man of Gods and monsters y The mummy, has been finding accommodation in a type of character that embroiders. That of the good-natured loner who makes you want to hug him, and who could be any of us, in need of emotions, at a certain point in life.