‘Rental Family’ Offers a No-Judgment Look at Hired Affection in Japan
In Hikari’s new film, Brendan Fraser steps into the real-life industry of rented relatives, turning Tokyo from a city of solitude into one of connection.
Director Hikari with Brendan Fraser on the set of Rental Family.
Photographer: James Lisle/Searchlight PicturesWith cameras gliding through Tokyo’s cherry blossom trees and shoji-screened interiors, international filmmakers have long cast the city as a sprawling theater for loneliness. Its scale, techno-futurism and perceived foreignness have inspired a cinematic symphony of ennui, reflected in the dystopian projections of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to more contemporary portraits of urban drift in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days.
Like many American millennials, I first saw Tokyo on-screen in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, where a jet-lagged Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray navigate an elusive and dreamy city of distant otherness. Their nocturnal misadventures and daytime boredom play out against views of the city’s soaring skyline framed by their hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows.