Hikari’s Rental Family

Hikari’s Rental Family

Co-Screenwriter, Director, and one of the main producers of the film Rental Family, Hikari, has pulled off her filmmaking in this production in a way that seems to have become rare.  She takes the audience into her world without telling them what to think or feel about it, allowing us to experience it for ourselves.  We follow U.S. expatriate, Phillip Vandarpleog (played with a seemingly natural ease by Brendan Fraser), as he navigates Japan as a stranger, an outsider, in what remains a foreign land even after 7 years of life there.   Phillip is an actor trying to make it here, trying to find his niche, attempting to find where he belongs.

Phillip’s agent finds him an acting job in which he is supposed to portray his role in real life.  The man who is the mastermind behind this rental family business, Shinji Tada (played by Takehiro Hira), offers Phillip a regular job as a “token white guy”.  Phillip eschews the job at first as being “fake”, but finds himself pulled into this community of actors who are taking the stage in the real world.  Here he is immersed into the daily lives of the people living on the stage that is Tokyo, Japan, where he becomes whatever it is they need him to be or at least want him to be.  What he wants to be to the people he is hired to interact with eventually becomes inescapable to him.

Hikari weaves us through random lives lived in her story about a community of characters living in asundry parts of Tokyo.  In day-to-day life in Tokyo, we meet a mother trying to do best by her daughter.  Someone is looking for a friend to play games with.  A famous Japanese actor in the twilight years of his life does not want to leave unfinished business.  Another man wants to understand  the value of his life.  Through each person met, each new setting entered into inside daily Tokyo, we get a little of Hikari’s perspective on the meaning of a life.  Yet, it’s not a forced hand.  She lets the audience experience these lives through her eyes while allowing us to wrestle to our own conclusions.

The lines between what is real, or genuine, and what is pretend, or a lie, is stretched to its thinnest as Phillip and his fellow actors; Shinji Tada, Aiko Nakajima (played by international actress Mari Yamamoto), and Kota Nakano (played by Kimura Bun); become all things to all people.  How much make-believe is good for us in daily life?  Can playing along be healing?  How far is too far?  How long can you live in a pretense before you lose your true self?  What does it mean to live in authentic relationship with God?  What does true community consist of?  Those are some of the questions that I’ve come away with.  Some of your questions will likely be different.  I think that’s the beauty in Hikari’s Rental Family.  The story does come to a close, but the questions are for us, the audience, to answer.