Withdrawn and inarticulate, the heroine of Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter lives primarily inside her own imagination. And during at least two crucial scenes, this deadpan comedy seems to crawl in there with her.
Director David Zellner’s film (co-written by brother Nathan Zellner) riffs on an urban legend. In 2001, a young Japanese woman was found dead in frigid northern Minnesota. She almost certainly committed suicide, but the story arose that she was searching for the loot buried in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, which begins with the winking assertion that “this is a true story.”
The Zellners’ movie opens with the same line, glimpsed through the visual noise of a badly decomposed VHS copy of Fargo. Then the filmmakers rewind to show, allegedly, how Kumiko got the tape: during a sort of Minnesota Jones adventure in a cave.
Cut to workaday life, which is considerably less antic. Kumiko (Pacific Rim‘s Rinko Kikuchi) is a uniformed OL (office lady) for an imperious boss at a midsize Tokyo company. He says she should be married by now — she’s 29 — which is the same thing her mother insists when Kumiko takes her phone calls. As much as possible, the young woman avoids everyone except her pet rabbit, Bunzo, and the residents of Fargo.
Kumiko speaks so little, in either Japanese or English, that her character seems partly modeled on the deaf teenager the versatile Kikuchi played in Babel. The Zellners have even worked a deaf character into their fable.