Kantai (Hospitalite)

This film was written and directed by Koji Fukada and released in 2011. It stars Kanji Furutachi, Kumi Hyôdô, Tatsuya Kawamura, and Bryerly Long.

The tale is complicated, and it left me in the dark; I have a general understanding of what happened, but some of the details still puzzle me.

Generally, Mikio has inherited a small printing business in Tokyo, which he runs with his wife, Natsuki, and one employee who is there only to get sick and be replaced. Also living with Mikio are his small daughter and his recently divorced sister. There is some gentle conflict between Mikio and Seiko because he started using her room when she left to get married. When the employee falls ill, he is replaced by Kagawa, who just happened to be there, just happened to know how to run the printers, and just happened to have no job and no place to stay, so Mikio offers him a spare room upstairs.

This is where things start to spiral down the rabbit hole into Alice in Wonderland. Mikio gives Kagawa the impression that Mikio's wife passed away. Instead, she seems just to have passed to another man because we see her later with a 9-month-old baby. C'est la vie. And although Kagawa was given permission to live in above the shop, he appears one day with a blonde woman he introduces as his wife. Then he says the marriage is a joke. Then he says he's just kidding. She says she's from Brazil. She also says she's from Bosnia.

Kagawa takes considerable interest in the business, which is doing okay but barely. He discovers that Natsuki is skimming a hundred thousand yen or so from the business every month to give to her half-brother who is blackmailing her. Kagawa's wife seduces Mikio in front of a window as Kagawa watches with satisfaction. He soon blackmails both Natsuki and Mikio, though not for money. He buys their silence. A few dozen people appear at the shop one day, and Kagawa introduces them as his wife's family. (She's Annabelle, I forgot to say.) The people appear to be descended from a variety of stocks: Asian, European, and African, to name a few obvious stocks. There's no way they're her family. When Mikio and Natsuki try to object, Kagawa has something on both of them which assures their silent assent.

I have the impression that the culture in the family home is to avoid dissent any way, so it's not a significant rupture to have them stay silent. The interesting thing is that Kagawa appears to have learned that if you cheat instead of playing by the rules, you always wins. More people show up. We have no idea what's going on. There's a long line for the one family bathroom every day (all day, it seems). The strangers end up running the various presses, ordering supplies, and doing all the work, while Mikio and Natsuki huddle together in a room and watch, nonplussed.

Eventually at a birthday party thrown for Natsuki, the party spills into the street, the police are called, and we find out what is going on. I won't spoil the plot, and I should mention that I have left out several significant subplots. From my point of view, too much is left hanging to have the movie make sense. Kagawa's goings-on wrap several subplots together, and the movie is just sort of left hanging. My impression is that no dissent will be shown and that things will go back to normal. It may be that my lack of understanding of the Japanese culture has left me too bereft of cues that should have filled in those details. I liked the movie; it's a mild comedy-cum-mystery. But I just couldn't put all the pieces together to make it fulfilling.