It could be argued that the closest relative to films about dementia is the murder mystery. There are certainly many common features: a victim and an enigmatic killer; false memories and red herrings; clues from which an identity must be pieced together; and a (usually jubilant) resolution in which said identity is revealed, if only briefly. In this sense, Kei Chika-ura’s latest feature, Great Absence, is not natural and convincing in spite of its thrilling (if not always successful) blend of Florian Zeller’s The Father and Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, but because of it.
After a workshop of Ionescu’s Exit the King, Takashi (Mirai Moriyama), an actor of moderate fame, receives a call from the police. His father Yohji (Tatsuya Fuji), whom he hasn’t seen for some twenty years, has just been detained by local authorities after placing a phony distress call that resulted in his house being raided by armed officers. Understandably shocked, Takashi and his wife Yuki (Yoko Maki) immediately fly out to meet Yohji and his partner Naomi (Hideko Hara), for whom Yohji left Takashi’s mother back when Takashi was a boy. But there is no sign of Naomi, and no clues as to where she might have gone: Yohji, who has lately been beset by dementia, claims that she is dead; and Naomi’s son, who resents Yohji for turning his mother into a housekeeper, claims that she is recovering in hospital, though this too proves to be a lie.
The rest of the story plays out in disordered flashbacks, which soon reveal a sad truth: the more Takashi learns about his father, the less familiar his father becomes. After leafing through Naomi’s diary, for example, Takashi discovers that the stern, stand-offish disciplinarian of his youth was actually an out-and-out romantic who wrote Naomi some charming, painfully honest love letters: “I pushed forward with my work, and tried so hard to forget you by thoughtlessly building a family with another woman I didn’t love. I regretted it more and more each day.” And later, during a conversation with Naomi’s son, Takashi learns about the other side of his ailing father’s personality: namely, that he sexually harassed and physically abused Naomi’s sister when she briefly took over care duties.
This dark, complex scenario is played out with masterly restraint by Moriyama, whose Takashi loves out of pity and pities out of love, and by Fuji, who superbly conveys two opposing temperaments at once: one nasty and broken, the other decent but lost. Without such performances, the film’s already quiet power would be nigh on silent, for its poetic aspects are often either obvious and simplistic or abstract and confusing. The radios and antennas, for example, are touching symbols for Yohji’s mental isolation, but they greatly simplify the nature of his struggle, which is as much a moral one as it is a verbal one. In a similar vein, it is hard to see just what tension the juxtaposition, or apparent simultaneity, of Takashi’s rehearsal and Yohji’s distress call is supposed to strengthen, or to what narrative logic the ambiguity is supposed to appeal. Is it to the idea that the pains of the father are replicated in the son? Or that father and son are doomed to communicate only in their imaginations (Yohji in his radio operator fantasy; Takashi in his acting)? Or is it, in fact, an attempt by Chika-ura to resolve in art what he and his father could not resolve in reality?
Yet for all the weak symbolism, Great Absence‘s achronological structure is a triumph. Typically, in films about dementia, such structures are used as crude simulations of the fragmented mind, but here the various loops and recursions more suggest some kind of involuntary memory à la Proust, or, more accurately, a filmic rendering of Kierkegaard’s remark that life must be understood backwards but lived forwards. Indeed, we hear an analogy for the “forwards” part of this remark during Takashi’s workshop scene: “Nothing will be forgotten. It’s all quite safe in a mind that needs no memories. A grain of salt that dissolves in water doesn’t disappear: it makes the water salty.” The “backwards” part is provided by Chika-ura’s consummate cast, who, while taking us deep into the fog of illness and despair, continually reflect on their clear images of the past, not so as to understand them as such, but so as to learn to accept them.
Great Absence enters limited release on Friday, July 19.
The post Great Absence Review: Kei Chika-ura’s Drama is a Triumph of Structure first appeared on The Film Stage.
