Dementia has long been a go-to theme for Japanese movies and TV dramas. Demographics is a reason: Japan, with its aging population, faces a tidal wave of elderly with cognitive impairments, so filmmakers are responding to a tragedy ever more common around them.
Kei Chikaura’s dark family drama “Great Absence” is the latest domestic film with an Alzheimer’s-affected protagonist. Co-scripted by Chikaura and Keita Kumano, it does not spare the audience the specifics of the disease, which reduces a retired university professor, Yohji Toyama (Tatsuya Fuji), from an eloquent speaker at a deceased mentor’s memorial service to a babbling paranoid shell.
Cue-the-violins sentimentality, though, is nowhere in sight. Instead, we see the damage he has done to those around him with his callousness, selfishness and, in one graphically depicted incident, sexual violence. Unlike the cranky but warm-hearted old men Fuji has made a late-career specialty, “lovable” never comes to mind as a descriptive for this character.
Somewhat puzzlingly, Yohji’s estranged actor son Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) can’t completely hate him, even after being subjected to a relentless drizzle of negativity from his father, who contradicts everything he says and denigrates everything he does despite the two-decade blank in their relationship.
The reason for Takashi’s tolerance becomes clearer as the story shifts back and forth between the onset of Yohji’s illness five years earlier to the present, when he has taken up residence in a care home — and Takashi and his understanding wife, Yuki (Yoko Maki), rush to his side after hearing he has been arrested for an unspecified offense.
That is, there is more to the story than Yohji’s troubled past and current mental decline, beginning with the unexplained disappearance of his devoted second wife, Naomi (Hideko Hara). The unraveling of this and other mysteries adds an element of disquieting suspense without descending to contrived plot twists.
Some questions remain unanswered, which may be partly due to the 19 minutes cut from the film following its 2023 Toronto Film Festival world premiere. But the central drama, which revolves around Takashi’s search for the truth about his father, including why he abandoned his family for Naomi, retains a novelistic richness.
One comparison is Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car,”in which Hidetoshi Nishijima’s theater director sorts out his feelings about his dead wife with the aid of Toko Miura’s taciturn driver. In Hamaguchi’s film, the flowing naturalism of the storytelling masks the thoroughly thought-out narrative structure. In Chikaura’s, the pillars and beams of plot-making are more visible, one example being the obvious parallels between the play Takashi is rehearsing and Yohji’s drama of painful decline.
Still, “Great Absence” is more explicitly poetic than rigidly programmatic. Takashi ends up sympathizing with the tortured romantic Yohji once was, even reciting lines from his love missive to Naomi in a beachside soliloquy. Not that Takashi thereby excuses Yohji’s many faults, but he recognizes something kindred in Yohji’s now nearly vanished spirit.
The “great absence” of the English title refers to both Yohji’s physical and emotional absence from Takashi’s life and the yawning pit that the disease has opened in his memory, swallowing everything he once held dear. But in Takashi’s eloquent response to that letter, at least, we see that souls can commune across generations, however distant they may have been in life. Or to put more simply, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
| Rating | |
|---|---|
| Run Time | 133 mins. |
| Language | Japanese |
| Opens | July 12 |
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