Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter -- CALL discussion notes

Following a treasure map, a lonely and introverted 29-year-old Tokyo Japanese woman finds a VHS of the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo buried in a cave. In the film she watches the Steve Buscemi character bury a satchel of money in a snow-covered field. Believing that scene to be real, she sets out for Minnesota then North Dakota to recover the money. First she sets free her pet rabbit Bunzo on the subway. She uses her boss’s company credit card until it is cancelled. From an ice covered lake she digs up a satchel that turns out to be a piece of slate. In a snowy field she finds the satchel of money and Bunzo, then triumphantly ascends the snowy screen and disappears. 

Consider the following questions:

1. How is Kumiko characterized in the opening and closing shots? Why the contrast between sun and snow? How is space used in both?

2. Why is the VHS tape found in a cave? Why VHS?

3. What’s the point of Bunzo the rabbit?

4. How would you define the director’s shooting style?

5. Is director David Zellner’s appearance as the policeman significant?

6.The plot is based on a real situation, which led to the discovery of a Japanese woman’s corpse in a Minnesota field in 2001. Does this affect your reading of the film?

7. What larger themes does the film open? The power and limitations of film/art perhaps? The contrasts between Japanese and US culture? Any others?

8. What do the individual stages of Kumiko’s odyssey signify? Is there any order or interplay between them?

9. How do we read the happy ending?

10. What is the style and function of the comedy?

11. How does the music work? Especially how in the snowy awakening scene? The “Dream” song at the airport?

12. How does the film evoke Fargo? Psycho?  Anything else?

13. How do we read Kumiko’s clothing? The red hood? The blanket?

14. What’s the significance of the boss? The other Office Ladies? The mother?  The old friend with daughter? The library security guard? The hospitable woman? The bus driver? The cop? The joyriding teenagers? The deaf cabbie?

15. How do we read the film’s Tokyo? at is the significance of the Spanish conquistador?

16. What’s the role of gender here? Why does the cop report the castration of Paul Bunyan’s blue ox Babe?

17. What do the phone scenes signify?

18. What do the tea spit and dry cleaner scenes signify?

19. Why does Kumiko need to send Bunzo off on the subway?

20. How do we read the stretched videotape?

Reflect on the following lines of dialogue:

1. This film is based on a true story.
2. We all have to find our own path.
3. Thief!
4. A normal film is a fake.
5. That’s an American folk tale, or something like that. 
6. It’s not fake!
7. Solitude is a fancy loneliness.
8. If we didn’t have these cultural barriers….