(Kei Chika-ura, 2023, Japan, 134 minutes)
In Kei Chika-ura's Great Absence, Takashi (Mirai Moriyama, who recalls Tadanobu Asano in his younger days), an actor who never really knew his father, finds himself entangled in the man's life as dementia overtakes him.
Chika-ura scrambles the timeline, so sequences play out before, during, and after Yōji's symptoms have kicked in. In the end, though, the bigger mystery involves his wife, Naomi (Shall We Dance's Hideko Hara).
In the not-too-distant past, Takashi visits his imperious father, Yōji (In the Realm of the Senses' Tatsuya Fuji), for the first time in 20 years.
The actor appears on a historical drama, which impresses his kindly stepmother, but Yōji is dismissive. In private, Naomi tells him that Yōji actually looks forward to it every week, but he's incapable of praising his artistic son in any way.
Five years later, Takashi and his producer wife, Yuki (Yôko Maki), settle Yōji, a former physics professor, into a residential care home. Naomi is out of the picture, and his father provides conflicting accounts of her whereabouts.
The care team believes it would be beneficial for Takashi to visit as often as he can. Though Kyushu is pretty far from Tokyo, he drops by once a month.
During one visit, Yōji claims he's been kidnapped. He also mentions an international conference, a virus, and someone named Tomoka Ogata. In sifting through his father's effects, Takashi puts a few pieces together.
Then, he meets Naomi's resentful, cash-strapped son (Masaki Miura), who tells a different story about her absence. As he meets other people from his father's past, he finds odd discrepancies, things that don't quite add up.
It's not unusual for those with dementia to get things wrong, but Takashi can't always tell when his father is misremembering or fabulating.
Yōji's protégé (Daisuke Tsukahara), Naomi's diary, and Yōji's love letters offer further clues, but Takashi never finds a definitive source who can decipher his enigmatic father for him.
By alternating between Takashi in the present and Yōji--with and without Naomi--in the recent past, Chika-ura, who drew from his relationship with his own father, provides a clearer picture to the audience, than to the son, of Yōji's disintegrating relationship with the love of his life as he loses more and more of his faculties and becomes increasingly confused and belligerent.
The film ends where it began with Takashi rehearsing a play, Eugène Ionesco's Exit the King, and Yōji slicking back his hair, putting on a suit, grabbing his briefcase, and leaving his house, possibly for the last time.
In Ionescu's 1962 play, a dying king, Berenger the First, is attended by his second wife, Queen Marguerite, who helps him to prepare for the end, at which point he disappears into a grey mist. That isn't exactly what happens in Great Absence, but the parallels are hard to miss. In that sense, the play serves a role similar to Uncle Vanya in Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car.
There's a bit more to it than that, but the ending is more inconclusive than not, which I found both frustrating and true to life, since you can't get back what has been lost once dementia has taken hold--the film may have also gained a little momentum and lost a little clarity when Chika-ura, who also edited, shortened it by nearly 30 minutes after it played the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023.
By pushing his son away to start a new life with a woman who already had two sons of her own, his father ensured that he would remain a mystery.
Chika-ura's first feature, 2018's Complicity, also centers on a young man, an undocumented Chinese immigrant (Yulai Lu), who secures a job at a restaurant run by Tatsuya Fuji's soba master (Fuji previously appeared in Chika-ura's short Empty House). There are similar themes at work, since Otousan's son believes he should retire, though he's still in great shape.
The filmmaker scrambles the timeline in this earlier effort, as well, to contrast Liu Wei's precarious life in China with his even more precarious one in Japan.
There's a tendency in films about dementia to resort to sentiment and cliché, which Chika-ura handily avoids in Great Absence, but the directness of Complicity proves more emotionally involving–as an actor, Yulai Lu also gives a more expressive performance, though Mirai Moriyama is also very good.
What stands out the most about both films: Tatsuya Fuji, who plays two very different roles--a judgmental father in one versus a warm-hearted father figure in the other--with indelible aplomb.
The career of the legendary actor has spanned Japanese masters from Nagisa Ōshima in the 1970s to Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takeshi Kitano in more recent years. Chika-ura may yet join their ranks, whereas 83-year-old Fuji was, and remains, among the finest talents his country has produced.
Great Absence opens in New York on July 19 and in Santa Monica and Glendale on July 26. There are no Seattle dates, but it comes to VOD on July 25. Images: Film Movement (Tatsuya Fuji, Mirai Moriyama, Fuji with Hideko Hara, and the poster) and SciFi Japan (Moriyama, Fuji, and Yôko Maki).
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