Too much of everything

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

HOSPITALITÉ (KANTAI). Viewed on Streaming. Scenario = eight (8) stars; cinematography/lighting = seven (7) stars; set designs/locations = six (6) stars; subtitles = four (4) stars; music = three (3) stars. Director Kôji Fukada rolls out a unique and effective mash up of humor, suspense, drama, blackmail, con artistry, and illegal aliens! Although it drags a bit here and there (mostly due to prolonged staring by the principal bumpkin characters), the scenario (Fukada is also credited as the script writer) provides ornithological symmetry by starting with an over-sized canary (actually a lost-bird poster thereof) and ending with over-sized pigeons (the human kind). As serial con artists extraordinaire, Kanji Furutachi and Bryerly Long easily steal every scene they are in, as they systematically take over control (via charm, alternative facts, blackmail, and seduction) of a small print shop with living quarters above and turn the place into a transient "safe" house for Gaijin refuges with cash (the latter mostly look like former English teachers whose contracts are up, but don't want to go home). Whether the Long and Furutach characters also help the police round up illegals is left open to question (but the police only seem to arrive when there is literally no space left for additional paying Gaijin). Cinematography/lighting (semi-wide screen, color) are fine. Interior print-shop shots are remarkable for squeezing film makers and equipment into a tiny space studded with printing machinery jutting into walk ways! Subtitles need some serious editing. They are usually just too long for those who are speed-reading challenged (and get sick of hitting the pause button). Music is sparse and mostly forgettable. Highly recommended. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

One day a man called Kagawa appears at a small family business. It turns out he is a vague acquaintance of the husband. Almost immediately he starts working and living there and soon moves in his mysterious 'Brazilian bride'. Before long, these two begin manipulating the situation and start taking massive liberties, while coming between the host couple in the process. None of the characters seem to be honest with each other and keep various secrets. Kagawa seems to be the only one aware of this fact, and so he exploits it to the fullest. He uses information he knows about the husband and wife in order to fulfil his main purpose which is to shelter a large group of illegal immigrants in this house.Hospitalité is a comedy-drama that is not really plot-driven; it's more of a character piece. It is not overly funny, although Kanji Furudachi as Kagawa does put in an amusing performance. But it's consistently likable, even if at times it does seem a bit meandering. For instance, there are a few plot strands that aren't developed very well. But like I say it's really more about the characters and they are engaging enough. This is quite a slight film but an enjoyable one nevertheless.

This film was written and directed by Koji Fukada and released in 2011. It stars Kanji Furutachi, Kumi Hyôdô, Tatsuya Kawamura, and Bryerly Long.The tale is complicated, and it left me in the dark; I have a general understanding of what happened, but some of the details still puzzle me.Generally, Mikio has inherited a small printing business in Tokyo, which he runs with his wife, Natsuki, and one employee who is there only to get sick and be replaced. Also living with Mikio are his small daughter and his recently divorced sister. There is some gentle conflict between Mikio and Seiko because he started using her room when she left to get married. When the employee falls ill, he is replaced by Kagawa, who just happened to be there, just happened to know how to run the printers, and just happened to have no job and no place to stay, so Mikio offers him a spare room upstairs.This is where things start to spiral down the rabbit hole into Alice in Wonderland. Mikio gives Kagawa the impression that Mikio's wife passed away. Instead, she seems just to have passed to another man because we see her later with a 9-month-old baby. C'est la vie. And although Kagawa was given permission to live in above the shop, he appears one day with a blonde woman he introduces as his wife. Then he says the marriage is a joke. Then he says he's just kidding. She says she's from Brazil. She also says she's from Bosnia. Kagawa takes considerable interest in the business, which is doing okay but barely. He discovers that Natsuki is skimming a hundred thousand yen or so from the business every month to give to her half-brother who is blackmailing her. Kagawa's wife seduces Mikio in front of a window as Kagawa watches with satisfaction. He soon blackmails both Natsuki and Mikio, though not for money. He buys their silence. A few dozen people appear at the shop one day, and Kagawa introduces them as his wife's family. (She's Annabelle, I forgot to say.) The people appear to be descended from a variety of stocks: Asian, European, and African, to name a few obvious stocks. There's no way they're her family. When Mikio and Natsuki try to object, Kagawa has something on both of them which assures their silent assent.I have the impression that the culture in the family home is to avoid dissent any way, so it's not a significant rupture to have them stay silent. The interesting thing is that Kagawa appears to have learned that if you cheat instead of playing by the rules, you always wins. More people show up. We have no idea what's going on. There's a long line for the one family bathroom every day (all day, it seems). The strangers end up running the various presses, ordering supplies, and doing all the work, while Mikio and Natsuki huddle together in a room and watch, nonplussed.Eventually at a birthday party thrown for Natsuki, the party spills into the street, the police are called, and we find out what is going on. I won't spoil the plot, and I should mention that I have left out several significant subplots. From my point of view, too much is left hanging to have the movie make sense. Kagawa's goings-on wrap several subplots together, and the movie is just sort of left hanging. My impression is that no dissent will be shown and that things will go back to normal. It may be that my lack of understanding of the Japanese culture has left me too bereft of cues that should have filled in those details. I liked the movie; it's a mild comedy- cum-mystery. But I just couldn't put all the pieces together to make it fulfilling.

The oddly-titled 'Hospitalité' ('Kantai'), Koji Fukada's film set in working-class Tokyo about a sudden "acquaintance" who moves in on a little family and takes over their house and business and invades with a horde of fake relatives, is a variation on the theme treated thriller-style in Dominik Moll's 2000 'With a Friend Like Harry,' which starred the charmingly menacing Sergi Lopez. This time the focus is on hidden secrets that backfire and an elaborate scheme to hide illegal immigrants. Fukada's droll comedy is a triumph of the deadpan that overwhelms itself with an overdone finale and a too-simple trajectory. This is one of those process tales. The alien takeover advances, proceeds, climaxes, explodes, and vanishes, leaving us with zero enlightenment about human beings or these characters, who remain opaque. So too with the mildly thought-provoking implications about Japanese xenophobia. But there is much neatness and drollery in the plotting and the acting here, and this is promising work.The plot opens with a family of four who live over a little printing business. The production has dwindled to subcontracted government pension envelopes for the elderly (a boom business). There's the husband, Mikio Kobayashi (Keji Yamaguchi); his very young wife Natsuki (Kiki Sugino), his divorced sister Seiko (Kumi Hyodo), and his young daughter Eriko (Eriko Ono), not by the young wife, whom Natsuki "tutors" in English, though she has only an elementary knowledge of the language. Eriko's pet parakeet, Pea (Pi-chan), has escaped and they put up a notice on the local bulletin board. Seiko is thinking about leaving the country, but meanwhile is involved with a local committee to deal with the threat of squatters and homeless people in the neighborhood.Kagawa (Kanji Furudachi) -- that's what he calls himself, anyway, tears down the parakeet notice and goes to the house, claiming to be the son of a man who originally financed the printing business with Kobayashi. The regular employee who operates the press has just fallen ill, and Kagawa offers to fill in. He also takes up residence upstairs, saying he's just been evicted. Without explanation he brings a foreign woman, Annabelle (Bryerly Long) who he says is his Brailian wife. She tells somebody else she's Bosnian, but she speaks unaccented English, and little Japanese. She adds the first truly ominous and weird note.Kagawa now proceeds to do his work, and we find out secrets as we watch. Mikio's previous wife did not die of an illness as he's told Kagawa; she left him and has remarried. Mikio runs into her while shopping, and Eriko has dinner with her -- she is, after all, Eriko's mother. Natsuki secretly meets with a seedy young guy called Honma (Naoki Sugawara) who turns out to be a relative who's getting illicit money from her. While Natsuki, Eriko, and Kagawa are out looking for the parakeet, which he pretends to have spotted earlier, Kagawa uses his binoculars to spy Mikio having sex with Annabelle. He uses this secret to force Miko to take in Natsuki's seedy relative as another assistant at the press, and he steps up production. Natsuki has an admirer, Kono (Tatsuya Kawamura), a pop singer, and she eventually has a secret with him too.And there is more that happens and to say it eventually quite strains credulity would be to overlook, perhaps, the intentionally surreal nature of the proceedings right from the beginning. The casualness with which details about people's lives are peeled, or reeled, off, reminds one of the plays of Ionesco. And, by the way, several of the principals here have strong theatrical experience, which may help explain good timing and pointed delivery of some key lines. Fukada is good at delivering his surprises. The only problem, but it is a serious one, is that when Kagawa's takeover goes into high gear, the event and its staging become so over-the-top that one begins to lose focus on the characters and in the end one realizes that nothing of any consequence has been revealed about anybody, really.The way the movie zeros in on a household and stays in its rooms suggests with deep irony how unlike Ozu or his more recent avatars all this is, though the film consciously alludes to him. These people like those of Morita's 'The Family Game' are a send-up of the traditional Japanese family. They're mismatched, ill-sorted, and not what they seem. Kenichi Negishi's sharp HD photography underlines the apathy, the lack of affect, an extreme of Japanese good manners that is the essential motor behind Kagawa's takeover. He can move several dozen illegal, foreign, and homeless people into a little petit bourgeois household and the inhabitants will be too polite to object. But of course the organized xenophobic neighbors, led by Toshiko (Hiroko Matsuda), are not at all happy. In the end, the intruders have fanished like a bad dream or a rowdy party; everything has gone back to where, physically anyway, it was; and there's a fresh parakeet in the cage to replace Pea. It's not the same bird but, "She won't remember," Mitsuko says, meaning Eriko.Koji Fukada, who is 31, and who wrote, directed, and edited, is a member of Seinendan Theatre Company. This is his fourth film. It debuted at the Tokyo Film Festival in October 2010. Seen and reviewed as part of New Directors/New Films March 23-April 4, 2011, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA, New York.