The opinion of the “World” – not to be missed
In the landscape of Japanese auteur cinema, Koji Fukada, 41, is one of the last figures to have emerged on the international scene, with filmic peregrinations disparate enough to confuse the tracks, between the sentimental chronicle ofGoodbye summer (2013), the futuristic fable of Sayonara (2015) or the family troubles ofHarmonium (2016). What nevertheless links most of his films, chained together at a sustained pace, is their taste for intimate decay, a way of scratching the varnish of Japanese society, as was still the case for The nurse (2019), with her heroine, whose love frustration was causing her downfall. Having found its audience in theaters, this previous film released in August 2020 convinced its French distributor to explore this already well-supplied work further upstream, by unearthing a previously unseen feature film from 2010.
If there was one thing that Fukada had not accustomed us to, it’s comedy, a genre to which nevertheless belongs Hospitality, thus throwing a new light on the author’s palette. In a quiet corner of Tokyo, the Kobayashi family, well in all respects, run a reprography shop and participate, from time to time, on the neighborhood watch committee.
Nationalist unthought
One fine day knocks on their door a certain Hanataro (Kanji Furutachi), unknown to the battalion but allegedly a friend of the family. Cunning and daring, the man knows how to make himself indispensable and takes a pension as a new employee in the household. In front of his forbidden hosts, he does not take long to impose his own rules, starting by bringing his companion, Annabelle (Bryerly Long), a Westerner without embarrassment who blithely violates the codes of decorum and makes the neighbors talk.
Hospitality is therefore presented as a typical story of infiltration, during which an external agent invites himself into the heart of a family to gradually undermine its unitary fiction like its image of respectability, sewn with a white thread (Fukada will do it again with Harmonium on a darker slope, but we can also think of Parasite, of South Korean Bong Joon-ho). Hanataro very skillfully establishes his grip on all the faults spotted within the Kobayashi clan: the father, Mikio (Kenji Yamauchi), good dough, remarried with a much younger woman (Kiki Sugino), raises a little girl from a first bed and hosts his divorced sister (Kumi Hyodo).
The family unit turns out to be the result of ruptures and recompositions rather than the fruit of a pre-established harmony. Everyone is led to conceal a parallel existence or inexpressible desires within the home (the libido at half mast of the couple of owners). Hanataro and Annabelle understood this well, by basing their seizure of power on an explicit sexuality: noisy antics, assumed nudity and extramarital pranks soon wreak havoc among the Kobayashi. It is thus to the freedom of the body as to everything repressed by the social superego that these two suborners resort in priority.
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