What did you watch? Kumiko The Treasure Hunter.

ooh, interesting. Is it a documentary about someone looking for treasure? No, but it is based on a true story.

ooh, did someone find a treasure and they made a movie about it? Actually, in real life, there was no one searching for any treasure.

I found out about this movie while reading about the Coen brothers movie Fargo. In Fargo, Steve Buscemi’s character buries a million dollars ransom in the snow along a painfully snowblinding road in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. Because the movie starts with a title card claiming that this is based on a true story, some people in the media tried to match up beats in the movie with real life crimes, only for the Coens to admit that they made the whole thing up, that it wasn’t based on anything from real life.

A few years after Fargo was released, a Japanese woman was noticed roaming around Bismarck ND, lost and holding what appeared to be a map. When the police interviewed her, she said”Fargo” and they figured that she had seen the movie Fargo and the map was something she made to find the suitcase full of money from the movie. I’m not kidding. She was sent on her way to Fargo, and after staying there for a couple days, walked out over the Minnesota border into a wooded area and died overnight, likely from exposure to the harsh winter weather.

Later someone found out that she had sent a suicide note to her family back in Japan; she travelled to America to try to reconnect with an American boyfriend who was married. A documentary, This Is A True Story, clears up a lot of what happened by talking to the police and others in the area who had met her, along with her landlord back in Japan.

Another movie, the fictional full-length Kumiko The Treasure Hunter, took the urban legend and ran with it. The title character is an office worker in Japan. She has a pet rabbit, the only thing she can connect with. We’re introduced to Kumiko following a map into a cave on a shore where she finds a video tape, which (I infer) was a copy of the Coens’ Fargo. She obsesses over the scene of Buscemi burying the money, trying to figure out the distance between fence posts and how far from the road. (Of course, the fence in this scene goes on for miles, with no distinguishing geography whatsoever, so Buscemi’s character plants his tiny red ice scraper on top of the spot he buried the money.)

Kumiko is berated by her boss for being old, single, and disinterested in the work. He himself is disinterested in the work, or must be, since he’s introduced with his head on his desk. She bumps into a former classmate and tries to ignore the attempt at reestablishing contact with them. She also acts erratically – there’s no reason for her to try to steal a book from the library. She’s met with pity and disdain as she begs for a page from the book, a map of North Dakota. In her final act of defiance against her boss, she uses his company credit card for the purpose of buying his wife a gift (of Kumiko’s choice) to book a flight to Minneapolis.

The plot echoes the urban legend and a few facts from real life that fed the story, including a police officer who brings her to a Chinese restaurant in hopes for a translator (in the film, the officer asks if it’s close to Japanese). A woman also sees Kumiko roaming the highway and takes her home. The local woman talks about her trips with her (unseen) husband (i’m inferring he had died) and lets Kumiko sleep in her son’s room, lamenting that the son had moved to California and never visits. Kumiko is out the window in the next scene to resume her quest.

Does she have disdain for everyone? Is everyone trying to keep her from her delusional trip or are they selfish people projecting their own lack of control in their lives by trying to control her? That’s something I was thinking about while watching the movie, knowing that The End is likely going to mirror the urban legend in some way. Well, it’s “ambiguous” if you forget that the money in the movie Fargo isn’t there, or anywhere. Whether the movie takes place in 2001 when the real life woman died in the woods, or 2014, it’s remarkable that there’s no plot point of Kumiko looking up production details or anything else about the movie. Like, it’s not a documentary, otherwise the camera crew in Fargo would know where the movie was. And, is she delusional? Psychotic? Schizophrenic? Should she have been medically treated a long time ago? Another question that doesn’t have an answer in the film is where she got the map, or info about the location, for the cave in the opening of the film? There’s no checking in with other characters for her to explain what must be a treasure hunting hobby, something she exaggerates beyond something to pass the time.

Mirroring the urban legend’s reality would have been a beat out of a dark existential commentary of a film, or a horror movie, so we have to infer that she’s having some kind of life ending dream with no cut to its dark reality. Which is fine. She is a lonely character and you feel for her; she’s not bumbling her way through ruining anyone’s day as she searches for the money. I still don’t know how I feel about such an open ending.

The real life story is tragic. People probably snicker at the urban legend which likely wasn’t corrected in the media in the weeks after the truth may have been relayed to, say, the police who had investigated it, and likely anyone who did know her probably had no idea she had become an urban legend, and who would look that up right away after such distressing news? I feel for the real life victim who found herself in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but freezing temperatures, having missed out on someone she loved, and gave up. In Kumiko’s mind, she didn’t give up.

Is that the lesson from the film? I don’t know. I’ll be thinking about it for a while, I’m sure. I rented it online so there’s no commentary for me to listen to so I can be told what everything symbolizes, plus how they shot on location, or whatever.

Was it good? It was okay. I also don’t know if I would have seen a movie about the heartbreak the real person was going through. Would a plot point have been how the urban legend grew after it, mocking (in the movie) the lady’s death? It looks good, was made well, and I’ve got a lot to ponder, so those are usually signs of a good movie, despite a few questions that could resolve plot holes.

You can see This Is A True Story here. If you can’t tell, the stills are with an actress/model, to recreate as much as they could on the real life woman’s events in North Dakota. But everyone else pictured in the film were local people she had interacted with in real life.