The business of replacing one person with another, such as a father who could not attend a wedding, is a curious phenomenon in modern Japan. Werner Herzog evaluates it in European dry and without unnecessary emotions. At the beginning and end of the film, we see the director himself, who explains how he worked on the film and what he thinks about such a curious fact of social life. The film will show several replacement stories, united by a kind of comforting general idea that even people and fake emotions are still real. No virtual contact can replace live communication, even in such a strange way.
I first learned about the replacement service from the film “Noriko’s Dining Table” by Japanese Sion Sono about 10 years ago, so Herzog does not reveal anything new. Unlike Sono, who plunges simply into the terrible depth of the human heart, the European director’s gaze in a semi-documentary manner slides along the surface of customized meetings, which is associated with a certain cultural distance, and with the goal not to dig up something in the human psyche, but to bring a common social denominator to the phenomenon under study. The name of this denominator, as Herzog believes, is loneliness, the very "loneliness on the Internet."