Carew also gives praise to 'Kumiko, The treasure Hunter'.
In October 2013, the street artist Banksy — an Englishman who’s the world’s most famous contemporary artist, yet still safely enshrined in complete anonymity — staged a month-long ‘residency’ in New York. Every day, a different work would be ‘unveiled’ at an undisclosed location around the city. This ongoing show was called Better Out Than In, proving that this Scarlet Pimpernel of oft-illegal stencilling, cloak-and-dagger social-commentary, and conceptual-art pranksterism loves a good fart joke.
Banksy Does New York is set in that month, but wasn’t shot then. Director Chris Moukarbel had previously co-directed Me @ The Zoo, a portrait of human-meme Chris Crocker (AKA the ‘Leave Britney alone!’ guy) assembled wholly from online imagery. In turn, Banksy Does New York is built not from footage Moukarbel shot, but from endless citizen videos; less crowdsourced than cherry-picked. For, this is the story of the Banksy residency: the mass hysteria it caused both on the ground and on social media; how the artist both ‘played’ the city and the internet, sending people scurrying on a treasure hunt to find his latest work, phones in hand. Moukarbel didn’t have to scurry or rush or dig for his footage, just search for #banksyny.
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Where Exit Through The Gift Shop —the 2010 Oscar-nominated in-joke directed, with theatrical élan, by Banksy himself— took audiences inside the covert world of street-art celebrity, Banksy Does New York is made entirely without his involvement, and has little interest in the mystery of his secret identity. For all the times it genuinely becomes a discussion on Banky’s art and ideas, the documentary is not really about the artist.
Instead, it’s about everything that surrounds him; not a portrait of the ringmaster, but the circus. It’s about his residency as it plays out on streets and on screens, in hashtags and hype. Moukarbel’s sourced videos show people on the trail of the elusive: searching for treasure, chasing ghosts, following the flock, scrapping for their piece of social currency, starting fights. As normal life in random locales is interrupted, Banksy functions as agent of chaos, causing a daily furore in a city that thinks itself above-and-beyond weirdness, attention-seeking, celebrity. His most satirical, trenchant works are indivisible from their location, social commentaries on the canvas of New York: on gentrification and ghettoisation, graffiti mythos and big-city authenticity.
As always, his work is attuned to the ‘Out’ in which it’s staged, throwing in on the eternal debate of public space vs private ownership. The latter notion becomes fascinating when people who possess the walls or doors or carparks upon which a Banksy has been bequeathed become ad hoc art stewards. Some respectfully cover works in plexi glass, some paint over them, some remove them; some treat having to deal with the circus as pure nuisance, others like they’ve just won the lottery.
Moukarbel becomes fascinated not just with the collective hysteria surrounding the New York residency, but with the cottage industry that has sprung up around an artform that once refused to be monetised. If Banksy is the invisible, anonymous, never-seen hero of this tale, then the filmmaker at least finds an on-screen villain: ‘breaking’ the 31-day wall and his crowdsourced mandate to shoot a whole B-story involving Stephan Keszler, a German art-dealer who buys purloined Banksy works and attempts to sell them for collector-esque prices to a comically-horrifying collection of tacky-and-tanned 1%ers at his gallery in the Hamptons.
Banksy Does New York digs into this idea —ownership as it relates to unowned art— with depth. But, it also crams a lot into its 80 minutes, giving a moment to every angle in the Banksy debates, even the most stupid ones (see: Mayor Bloomberg giving the good ol’ ‘graffiti is not art, but a crime, it leads to moral decay, etc’ speech). But the best ideas come not from the filmmakers, art critics, nor denizens of the streets, but from the artist himself.
As part of his residency, Banksy: stages an outdoor ‘exhibition’ under high-line train tracks in the gallery district; has an actor as shoe-shine boy polishing Ronald McDonald’s oversized clown-feet in front of a South Bronx McDonald’s; sends a stock-transportation truck filled with adorable animatronic stuffed animals and squealing sound-effects through the Meatpacking District streets; and, best of all, sells anonymous ‘Spray Art’ by Central Park for $60 to no clamouring crowds nor gathering social-media storm, attracting only three barely-interested buyers in an entire day. It’s hard to miss the gleeful irony at play, but the message rings clear: whilst acolytes, activists, taggers, sheep, shysters, and buyers chase phantoms and dream of figurative/literal riches, ‘priceless’ art is often right there, under people’s noses, just waiting for someone to stop and look.
“This is a true story,” are the first words we see on screen in Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. But they’re not the film’s own: instead, they’re the flickering text of a wobbly video, which Rinko Kikuchi (so so great, as ever) sits down to at night, a balm for the daytime drudgery of life as humbled, bullied secretary in ever-unforgiving Tokyo. It’s the opening title card to the Coen Brothers Fargo, a real-life film that was, clearly, not a true story; these words, like so much in the Coens’ cinematic world, sly irony.
But for a lonely, depressed salarywoman, the words —and the story— are like a lifeboat; and, obsessed, she watches the film nightly, committing it to memory. Like the figures in Fargo, she’s a dreamer, yearning to escape a rut; making her easily seduced by greed, that buried briefcase full of cash in the film calling out to her like a siren song; her degrading VHS like a worn treasure-map. So, like an adventurer of yore, she sets sail for foreign shores, arriving in North Dakota in search of buried treasure, unaware that she’s chasing a myth.
Taken at face value, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter —the latest film for the Zellner brothers, following the raw wound of Kid-Thing, a micro-budget picture of the angriest, cuntiest 10-year-old you’ve ever met— is a dry cross-cultural comedy that, in its oblique, open-ended third act, strives for the transcendent. It’s a romanticised take on self-destruction in which cinema lingers as the divine, its heroine either —depending on your own sense of cinematic romance— descending into madness or ascending into her fantastical dreams.
But the film also exists as a fascinating part of an ongoing conversation about cinema and veracity, truth and myth. Unlike Fargo, Kumiko really is based on a true story: that of Takako Konishi, a Japanese travel agent found dead in snowy Minnesota fields in 2001. A documentary would arrive, soon after, in 2003; English filmmaker Paul Berczeller picking up on a novelty news item about Konishi’s death, voyaging to America and Japan in search of truth, then of something more lyrical. He called it, with Coen-esque wryness, This Is A True Story; even though, in the end, Berczeller seemed less interested in reality than romance. His film doesn’t foreshadow Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter as much as Carol Morley’s great in-search-of-a-dead-girl-from-a-newspaper movie Dreams Of A Life, a docu-fantasy that becomes a kind of cinematic séance.
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’s parade of luminous images —especially, on close, Kikuchi in fairytale-esque red hood, striding into the snowy woods— are the Zellners’ own dreams of a life. They first heard the tale on message-boards in the months after the event, whispered about as an unsubstantiated urban myth; in the absence of fact, they turned to fantasy, penning a screenplay imagining the life of this person. That it took them 12 years from first-draft to finished film has changed the tenor of what they’ve delivered: Kumiko essentially a film calling back to that suddenly-distant day: back when a film’s joking storytelling claims could be mistaken for truth; when a tall tale could circulate, taking on a life of its own far from the watching eye of Snopes.
Based On A True Story title-cards have, at this point in cinema history, become utter banality. Oscar season annually brings a fresh batch of real-life tales, and recent years have found the dispiriting rise of Op-Ed pieces vetting contenders for their veracity, each ‘expert’ in their field not bringing enlightenment, but ignorance; these the accountants neglecting what Werner Herzog once called “the ecstatic truth” of storytelling (it’s no coincidence that the Zellners cite Herzog as a hero, and had him host a Kumiko Q&A in LA).
The Coens presaged this dispiriting day when, in their Fargo title-card joke, they wrote: “the names have been changed [but] out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” Making a film exactly as reality occurred seems like the worst way to tell a story; that’s reportage, not cinema. Kumiko, at its best, is a rebuke against this kind of minute-keeping thinking. It’s an artful, noble attempt to find that “ecstatic truth” that never loses sight of the great gifts of cinema: the artform’s capacity for empathy, and its similarity to dreams.