DIRECTED by: Masahru Take
The crowd-pleasing reverse-heist antics of the downtrodden craftsmen and amateur antique appraisers that fill Masahru Take’s We Make Antiques! with innocent mirth and light chuckles stems from its folksy reliance on “sticking up for the little guy.” The small-time fleecer, Norio (Kiichi Nakai), and the disgraced potter, Sasuke (Kuranosuke Sasaki), bonding over how the elitist antiques culture of the Osaka prefecture had used their lack of experience to take both for a ride, form a partnership to scam those so-called professionals and sell them a falsified antique.
Mostly for the money but also for redemption of their wounded pride as craftsmen, the pair use their skills to strike back against the higher-up influencers of the antique world, who trade in no less nefarious tactics but under the cloak of legitimacy, as they attempt to pass off handcrafted pottery that they “aged up” to look like the genuine article. Director Take mines the underdog story for a considerable amount of light comedy and absurdist appeal, stemming directly from its indelible motley crew of scam artists, but as “pulling a job” films go, this exercise is notably limp and consequence free when it comes to tension.
This aimlessness is played out early on when We Make Antiques! struggles to define the proponents of its central scam. Norio and Sasuke meet by happenstance, with the former hoping to swindle the latter out of a collection of pots that the latter claims his father has collected through antique dealers and is uncertain of their wealth. In truth they are all made by Sasuke, and the two are just passing the buck of their own exploitation from the shady Hiwatari Antique Shop further down the line to less fortunates, and inevitably a shaky partnership is formed to take the shop for all its worth.
Norio had lost his own shop after Hiwatari sold him a reproduction, and Sasuke had unknowingly been making his pottery to be sold off by the shop as antiques, but these revelations of motive come late in the film, well past the point when we get into the meat of working out the con.
The script, a collaborative effort by Shin Adachi and Masako Imai, is bogged down by this extensive amount of setup to establish these two as partners and inadvertently feels stifled. We Make Antiques! (actual translated title being the much more direct “Full of Lies”) is ostensibly back-loaded in that the appeal of the film is pushed to final moments where all the comedy and what little tension it can muster come to a head, but none of the lead-up feels like it directly impacts it.
Although I offer lighthearted praise for Take’s brand of equally lighthearted comedy, a significant amount of the jokes and absurd digressions do not play all too well in the context of the film. It’s character humor where all the laughs are meant to be a product of the wacky eccentricities of the cast, but that is rarely played up to any satisfying degree. In their quest to fake a tea bowl once allegedly used by historical figure Sen no Rikyu, they attend a museum exhibit about him and get hounded by an overly enthusiastic tour guide in one of the better examples of the wacky character humour you expect from these types of heist films. The problem with this and every other example of the amusing side character (the foreign antiques dealer who continually changes his identity, Sasuke’s socially awkward son, the doddering paper analyst who joins the crew) is that they don’t skew far enough to absurdity to really be funny or memorable. Take hints at this tone every now and then, especially in the extensive ending skit of a scam wedding completely separate from the actual plot, but regardless never goes far enough.
We Make Antiques! is middling inconsequential comedy and that is all it really has to be. When it puts on the airs of a quirky heist comedy without the follow through in tension or comedy to pull it off it robs the experience of being memorable. Even while the “job” is happening and all the factors and people are trying to pull off a multi-million dollar con, it was a challenge to gleam any anxiety or pressure pushed into the situation. Take, in his rather straightforward way of filming a scene in clear, digestible chunks of exposition, struggles to wring the scene of any laughs or heartbeat raising signs of failure. The assembled crew don’t get moments for their personal skills to shine and likewise the target of their deception is equally robbed of a proper villain moment to put their frustration into a readable context. Even as an “anti-heist” where all the deception goes into selling something rather than taking it, it has a loose understanding of that structure and can only hope to extract fleeting chuckles at best.
I will reiterate, that might be enough and We Make Antiques! turns the corner as lightly off-kilter, heartwarming fun of the little guy getting a win against the big dogs of the Antique World. Its lean and lacking in much of an emotional investment towards its central caper, or even how to present that caper in a recognizable format. But like said caper We Make Antiques! goes down easy enough, even if you may forget it ever took place.
