FILMS

Werner Herzog is one of modern cinema’s undisputed visionaries – but he’s also a frustratingly slapdash dilettante, his prolific output as a documentarist often preventing him from discovering anything truly significant before he flits on to the next topic, the next country. counts as an oddity even among Herzog’s wayward output. Set in Tokyo, it’s a fiction-documentary hybrid and features one Yuichii Ishii, who runs a company that hires people out to impersonate or stand in for clients’ family members. In this fictionalised account of his work, Ishii plays himself, taking on the role of surrogate father to a 12-year-old girl, Mahiro (Mahiro Tanimoto); for much of the film, we see them spending time together in parks, going boating, watching a samurai performance, even petting hedgehogs at, what else, a hedgehog café. Ishii also tactfully declines