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A Conversation with RENTAL FAMILY Writer/Director HIKARI

McEric chats with RENTAL FAMILY writer/director HIKARI.
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HIKARI’s RENTAL FAMILY is the feel-good charmer that everyone needs around Thanksgiving, a gentle reminder that family is organic, genuine, and irreplaceable. Even when we sometimes wish we could rent an understudy to fill our place.

RENTAL FAMILY stars Brendan Fraser as Phillip, an American actor living alone in Japan for the past seven years, struggling to find consistent work. Think LOST IN TRANSLATION, only don’t, because this film provides a much deeper portrait of Japan than Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winner. LOST IN TRANSLATION, though a beautiful portrait of loneliness, uses Japan as a superficial location, giving us the eyes of a visitor through which to take in its beauty. RENTAL FAMILY has an expatriate at its center but Phillip has taken swimmingly to his new home. He’s fluent, versed in the customs, and permanent. One never gets the idea that Phillip is working towards returning “home” - he is home. With him as our anchor, we feel like we belong, seeing past the tourist attractions to find the core of community.

Phillip is auditioning steadily, getting bit roles here and there, but he needs something with longevity. He stumbles into Rental Family, a service that sells “memories.” Mastermind Tada (Takehiro Hira) is introduced as a compassionate man with a fierce streak of pragmatism, which is aided by his right hand and lead actress Aiko (Mari Yamamoto). Brought on board as their “token white guy,” Phillip finds himself acting as a groom, a best friend, a karaoke champion, a journalist, and a long-lost

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[Brendan Fraser looking totally normal in RENTAL FAMILY]

Fraser is patently amazing in this role. Hard to believe that the man who brought us ENCINO MAN and AIRHEADS would become one of our most earnest and authentic actors working currently, but it’s undeniable. Fraser is so flawless in the role that it almost doesn’t even look like he’s acting, even when he’s acting as an actor on screen. Phillip is pushed and pulled through his assignments, listening, yes-anding, and reacting with an empathy that seems beyond his contemporaries or even us. Watching Brendan Fraser act as Phillip acting makes me want to be a better person.

[Brendan Fraser and Akira Emoto in RENTAL FAMILY]

The film is cleverly captured with an emphasis on windows - most establishing shots start on or through windows, and our earliest exposure to Phillip’s true self is him watching the city live without him through his window as though on a screen. It’s a voyeuristic picture, and that’s the tone of RENTAL FAMILY in a nutshell - we’re all on the outside, looking in, renting our time on this Earth and borrowing that same commodity from others. You’ll feel it when you get that elation from cancelled plans - it’s not antipathy but rather an admission that our time is finite, yours and others.

If I have any criticism for RENTAL FAMILY it would be its rigid adherence to screen story structure; if you’ve read Syd Field, Blake Snyder, or Joseph Campbell, you can call each and every beat of this film before it happens. Hell, if you’ve seen a movie before, you know how this one is going to play out. Does that diminish the emotional impact of its climactic scenes? No. But it is a bit annoying.

The film is directed by HIKARI from her script with co-writer Steven Blahut, and is positioned for a late-year release to generate Oscar buzz. Fraser could very well be a contender, as could the film’s cinematography, though the script does suffer from the pitfalls I mentioned. I got to chat with HIKARI a week ago about the genesis of the film’s theme, working with Brendan Fraser, and some of the film’s finer points.

Eric McClanahan: Hi! How are you today?

HIKARI: Good. How are you?

EM: I'm wonderful. Thank you. So let's get right into it. We're talking about RENTAL FAMILY and it's such a novel concept, however, it does seem plausible. Like I could believe that's an actual thing. How did you get the idea of RENTAL FAMILY?

HIKARI: Thank you for the question. During the pandemic, or a little bit before the pandemic, my writing partner Steven [Blahut] was just kind of randomly looking for a job that he can do in Japan, or American people can do in Japan. There's a cuddling service, there's a Butler Café service, you know. There's all these things that Caucasian can guys can do that Japanese cannot do. And then the rental family service was one of them and it wasn't quite a rental service. We found out later after we started digging in, but at the time it was just a service to be there for somebody. Basically, you know, whatever you need, we’ll be there for you, right? Do you need the screwdriver to screw something up? We'll be there for you. That kind of business.

So, that was the beginning of it, and then when we start digging in and looking for why this business exists, what happens there? Why this business in Japan? What kind of people use this service? Those are the kinds of questions we asked and we started doing the research and we found that there's about 300 companies in Japan currently existing that provide similar services. This business actually started back in the 80s when this company was just giving out like, you know, their employees to, say, in Japan to work over the holiday season. They said, we can get somebody to just pretend to be you and you can go work and triple your salary? And they're like, sure. So they send off these “family members” and then surprisingly the employees’ parents were totally fine with it and they're like, well, you know, when you come home, we have to do everything, clean up, cook everything. But these people took care of us. So that was perfect.

And so that was kind of phenomenal that I was like, wow, I did not know this existed. And from there we started doing the research and, you know, my own experience as a child. I grew up with a single mom and my mom used to lie to me all the time. [laughs] You know, the reason behind the lies were because she really cared for me and she really wanted to have the best for me. And even though she told me my dad was dead for a long time until I found out that he wasn't and he left for another woman. Because the neighbor told me and, and she's like, “ohh, he's your father.” And she pointed at the television and there's a really good looking guy on television. I thought that he was my dad. I just know that the parents, especially single parents, right? They're doing everything they can to really raise this kid. You know, I mean, think about it, right? They don't have a partner. They're going to do whatever they want to say to make sure that their families, their kids are going to do right, right? So, that was kind of like the whole putting together of this idea. I was an exchange student in Utah when I first came to America. So I just kind of flipped the idea. You know, my little isolation actually became not isolation so long because I became such good friends with all my friends in this US High School with me, and they’re all white girls, right? And they're like my best friends that I’m still good friends with. So what is it that family really means? Is it somebody you really can rely on? Somebody you work with, your best friends; they’re actually your true family too, you know? So, that’s the reason why I wanted to make this movie.

EM: I love it! I like that Phillip’s character, we pick up with him seven years into his stay in Japan, so that it's not a fully “fish out of water” story. You know, he's quite fluent and he's still a bit, you know, gaijin, but he's making his way.

HIKARI: Oh yeah.

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