When Koji Fukada's "Kantai (Hospitalite)" won the Best Picture Award in the Japanese Eyes section of last year's Tokyo International Film Festival, I wasn't surprised: It's brand of black comedy is funny in smart, original ways. Many reviewers have since compared it favorably with Yoshimitsu Morita's classic 1983 comedy "Kazoku Gemu (The Family Game)," which had a similar story about an eccentric stranger taking over an apparently normal, but dysfunctional, family. Many festivals have since screened it, including in Rotterdam, Hong Kong, ?San Francisco and New York.
And yet at TIFF I heard angry criticism of this film by foreigners, which may seem strange given its full-throated celebration of gaijin in general, with the xenophobic characters getting their comeuppance. ?But it does traffic in negative stereotypes, mostly via the stranger's sultry blonde girlfriend, who has a great sense of rhythm (she's a salsa teacher) but casually flouts social rules (including the one about not hopping into bed with another guy the minute your boyfriend walks out the door) and can barely string together two words of Japanese after five years in the country.
It's also hard, however, to detect any hint of mockery or disdain. In this sharply pointed but gentle-spirited film, gaijin serve the same role as the whiskey-pickled Irishmen in John Ford's "The Quiet Man" (1952): that is, exotic color and comic relief. Just as Ford loved the people he was caricaturing, Fukada admires his gaijin as live-for-the-moment free spirits. But their actions, as do those of the more conventional Japanese characters, have consequences not always pleasant.