Your Kontinent: Hospitalité is a tone perfect achievement

Imagine Pasolini’s Teorama reworked by Takeshi Kitano into a mostly amiable reflection on trust, paranoia, and Japanese society, and you’re getting close to Hospitalité.

Koji Fukada’s festival fave is set in a small printing press where Mikio Kobayashi lives with his wife, sister, and daughter. When Kagawa appears one day claiming to be the son of Kobayashi’s financier, he’s given a job plus room and board by the grateful business owner.

Gradually, Kagawa takes over the company and the lives of the family, installing his Brazilian or possibly Bosnian wife in the tiny home they all share, and eventually some two-dozen or so “relatives”—all of varying nationality and race. Meanwhile, Kobayashi’s marriage is failing and Kagawa has sleuthed out some behind-the-scenes financial secrets that could destroy the small business, and tear the family apart.

The film is careful to never clarify Kagawa’s motives, and Kanji Furudachi makes a meal of the man’s ambiguous, slightly sinister demeanor. His first scene with Kobayashi and his wife is a masterpiece of comic subtlety, and if Hospitalité doesn’t quite hit the same heights again, it’s still a largely tone perfect achievement with an ending that satisfies in a way that high-concept numbers like this one often don’t.

Hospitalité screens at the Performance Hall, Richmond Cultural Centre, on Saturday (July 21), at 3pm

You can follow Adrian Mack's contribution to the lobotomizing techno-nightmare known as Twitter at @AdrianMacked.