There can hardly be a bigger waste of time than this piece of twee nonsense. Bafflingly, it bears the imprimatur of Alexander Payne, the director of Election and Nebraska, who serves as executive producer. Rinko Kikuchi stars as Kumiko, a deeply depressed young woman in Japan who becomes obsessed with a fuzzy, old VHS copy of the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. Believing the treasure buried in the drama is real, she journeys to Minnesota to find it. Her emotional breakdown evidently explains this delusion: either that, or she is a faux-childlike imbecile. Poor Kumiko duly arrives in the US and proceeds to run out on various hotel bills and cab fares, with no consequences, either legally or in terms of plausible narrative development. She is helped, sort of, by a police officer, who appears to be another low-IQ innocent, believing for example that the Chinese and Japanese languages are the same. The metaphorical value of this tiresome shaggy-dog quest turns out to be precisely zero. Why not just rent a copy of Fargo instead?
