THE REAL THING: REVIEW BY TARA BRADY
03 April 2022
The Real Thing is the ninth feature from director Kōji Fukada, one of Japan’s most intriguing talents. His stated influences, including Eric Rohmer and Vincent Erice, are primarily European. At film school, he was mentored by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, one of the stars of turn-of-the-millennium vogue for so-called Asia Extreme titles. Unlike his tutor, Fukada does not make horror or genre films. He primarily explores relationships and families in his work, and yet he frequently finds horrific aspects in the domestic and familial spheres. Harmonium, which won the Jury Prize at the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, pivots around life-changing injuries deliberately inflicted upon a child and suicide.
Interestingly, even these melodramatic events are toned down in the writer-director’s work. Having been greatly influenced by the Seinendan theatre troupe, a company that specialises in very naturalistic theatre, Fukada, has found a way of making shocking or soapish narrative developments feel routine or humdrum. That methodology is evident in every aspect and frame of The Real Thing with its emphasis on office buildings, dreary corridors, and small flats.
When I spoke to Fukada about The Real Thing a few weeks ago, I mentioned the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. These are typically characters like Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, Natalie Portman in Garden State, or Melanie Griffith in Something Wild that turn the hero’s life into an adventure. Fukada hadn’t heard of the term, but it’s a device he’s familiar with. In his 2010 comedy, Hospitalité, a stranger is taken in by a family and begins bringing back oddball characters. In Harmonium, too, a stranger arrives, and assumes a carcinogenic role within a family.
In The Real Thing, a mysterious woman named Ukiyo, turns the protagonist’s life upside down. Tsuji is a dependable salaryman who is pursued by his attractive coworker Minako, but prefers the sensible charms of Ms Hosokawa. His grey, careful existence is disrupted by an encounter with Ukiyo, a homeless habitual liar with crippling debts and a daughter she seems to have no interest in.
Tsuji is repeatedly warned about Ukiyo, by everyone from her cuckolded husband to a gangster she owes money to. And again and again, she lets Tsuji down, she lies, she runs off, and then she apologises. He, meanwhile, remains completely obsessed with her. It’s a very different film, but in some respects The Real Thing, which was initially made as a TV series then edited into a four hour film for Cannes last year, recalls Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. It’s a parody of romance and the will-they, won’t they rhythms that govern that genre. The central relationship in The Real Thing is maddening and really quite demented. The script, which was adapted from a manga by Mochiru Hoshisato, presents love as a kind of mental illness. I was reminded, too, of A Girl Missing, Fukada’s 2019 drama, in which the original Japanese title was Yokogao, meaning “side profile”, an acknowledgment of the impossibilities of truly deciphering any complex person or relationship The Real Thing provides plenty of incident and details over an extensive run time but by the end, we’re still unsure if the title is ironic.
Tara Brady, film critic at The Irish Times.