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| The main cast of Hospitalité. |
Make yourself at home-lessness
By John Esther
Set somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan, members of a makeshift family are increasingly altered as more and more people occupy their home and work space.
Mikio Kobayashi (Kenji Yamauchi) is a hardworking, rather unintelligent man who owns a printing shop he runs with his considerably younger, wife, Natsuki (Kiki Sugino), who is also teacher his daughter, Eriko (Eriko Ono), some English. Rounding off the home is Mikio's sister, Seiko (Kumi Hyodo), who has just returned home after a failed marriage.
A simple reconstructed family, the Kobayashis remain afloat in the somewhat dye-ing business when Kagawa (Kanji Furudachi), the son of old friend of the family's appears, takes residence and a position at the printing shop.
It does not take long to see Kagawa's presence is more than suspect. First his wife, Annabelle (Bryerly Long), shows up. Where she came from she will never voluntarily tell truthfully. But her appearance is no mistake. Then the others, less Japanese, came in droves to live at Kobayashis. Thanks to mistakes on their part, individually and collectively, Mikio and Natsuki are unable to stop the occupation. Apparently the Kobayashis are the target of some foreigner scheme, much to the horror of their xenophobic, anti-homeless neighbors.
A well-acted, finely paced film, writer-director Koji Fukada's funny debut feature, Hospitalité, offers a deadpan look at the absurdity of any given "family" structure and plays it to an open-ended affect. The Kobayashis are not so much victims of foreign elements but of their own devious devices. If they were not so human, they would be just fine.
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