Some of the best recent movies have Asian provenance. Asian writer and comedian Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune and Brendan Fraser’s Japanese adventure (Rental Family) are both outstanding. Good Fortune skates perilously close to the Hollywood/Disneyfied fantasy line, and, ironically, Rental Family is more realistic, even though its a story about creating an illusion.
Jackie Chan’s martial arts movies include reality in the final titles with the outtakes, where Jackie Chan does not succeed in doing the incredible stunts he does for the film. The final titles’ failures are a reminder: what you just watched is an illusion. Don’t be fooled! Good Fortune exposes some uncomfortable truths about poverty in the US, but Rental Family is my favorite because it reminds us of how convincing illusions can be.
Of course, there are other ways to remind the audience not to get caught up in the fiction. Shakespeare has a play within a play in Hamlet, for one example.
Rental Family, starring Brendan Fraser, contains many surprising reminders that the reality portrayed in the film is not always what it seems. Fraser plays a desperate-for-work bilingual (Japanese/English) actor hired to provide emotional support for Japanese clients.
For the first scenes in his new acting gig, he pretends to marry a Japanese woman. The marriage is a ceremony to provide the woman’s parents with satisfying memories before she moves to Canada with her new pseudo-husband. After the wedding, we discover she’s lesbian, leaving her family to be with another woman. But the illusion is preserved in wedding photos; everyone gets to save face.
Another family hires Fraser to portray the father of a girl who has actually been raised by a single mother. He’s a necessary accessory to the child’s application for a good school. As one might expect, Fraser falls for the little girl and becomes fatherly in ways that convince the little girl he really is her dad. She’s later disillusioned when she sees him in a TV commercial.
But Fraser and the little girl reconcile after she’s admitted to the school, even though she knows he’s part of an elaborate illusion her mother arranged. Fraser tells her his character’s real name, and they remain friendly. The illusion isn’t necessary, but perhaps the letdown when it’s revealed is.
Rental Family has many other twists and turns, but the reminder of the distinction between illusion and reality is central to its theme.
Currently, American culture is fraught with heavily marketed illusions. Hollywood tells us the detectives always catch the bad guy. In reality, police solve less than 15% of crimes. Nevertheless, alternative strategies to manage crime remain unexplored, and cutting police budgets remains taboo.
A movie is only a subtle reminder that there’s an underlying pig beneath all that lipstick, but that may be all it takes. Meanwhile, Asian-adjacent films like Jackie Chan’s, Good Fortune and Rental Family say Asians are more interested in results than words.
One Western pundit who married a Chinese woman says that people in her culture are not so interested in declarations like “I love you” as they are in demonstrations of a loving relationship. Talk is cheap, but it’s a currency Americans have accepted for some time now.
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