Kei Chika-ura\u2019s \u201cGreat Absence\u201d is obviously a personal piece, the kind of drama in which one can sense a connection to the subject matter in the subtlety with which it\u2019s handled. Anyone who has dealt with the deterioration of a parent will find something resonant in Chika-ura\u2019s film, one that can sometimes feel self-indulgent in its pacing and length but never loses its nuance, thanks both to its refined direction and a truly stellar performance from the legendary Tatsuya Fuji. The iconic star of \u201cIn the Realm of the Senses\u201d won an acting award at San Sebastian this year, and it\u2019s easy to see why. Eschewing the many traps of a complex character, he truly elevates \u201cGreat Absence\u201d above the melodrama it could have become, crafting it into a tragic tale of a father and son who may no longer have time to reconcile. How does one reconnect and forgive when one half of the relationship may not have the emotional and mental capacity to do so?<\/p>\n
\u201cGreat Absence\u201d has a framing device in which an actor named Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) and his producer\/wife Yuki (Yoko Maki) are working on an avant garde production of Ionesco\u2019s Exit the King<\/em>. It\u2019s a play in which a leader and his kingdom essentially vanish, making Chika-ura\u2019s choice a bit on-the-nose given what unfolds in \u201cGreat Absence,\u201d a story of a patriarch who has lost basically everything, including his dwindling mental faculties, and how he essentially has one chance to reconnect with a son from whom he\u2019s essentially estranged. <\/p>\n Takashi and Yuki are forced to return to his home by a call to the police after an incident at his father\u2019s home. They come back to find a deeply confused Yohji, a man who no longer seems certain of who is or where he is. They also find that Yohji\u2019s longtime partner Naomi (Hideko Hara) is missing and Yohji asserts that she\u2019s committed suicide. If this all makes \u201cGreat Absence\u201d sound like a mystery\/thriller, it\u2019s not exactly that movie. Yes, there are secrets and plot twists, but Chika-ura\u2019s style is more deliberate in its effort to create confusion instead of tension. The script jumps back to times that Takashi visited in the past, partially to fill in how tense their relationship was and to give us more details about the missing Naomi, but also to allow the film to unfold almost like the fractured memories of someone near the end of their life. The structure of \u201cGreat Absence\u201d doesn\u2019t aggressively recreate dementia like something like \u201cThe Father,\u201d but there\u2019s an element of that displacement that\u2019s meant to unmoor viewers. <\/p>\n Takashi is certainly unmoored as he uncovers diaries that reveal elements of his father, Naomi, and his birth mother that he never knew about. Imagine learning great emotional secrets about a distant parent, only to be unable to unpack them because said parent can\u2019t trust their own memories or even sense of reality. \u201cGreat Absence\u201d is about family secrets, but it\u2019s more about how those can be shrouded and warped by the cruelty of aging.\u00a0<\/p>\n While Chika-ura\u2019s direction is strong enough to wonder if he\u2019ll be one of the next Japanese masters, he sometimes gets a bit languorous in his pacing. The version that played TIFF and San Sebastian was reportedly 152 minutes, which means 20 minutes have been cut since then, but it\u2019s still a film that drags in points even at 132.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kei Chika-ura\u2019s \u201cGreat Absence\u201d is obviously a personal piece, the kind of drama in which one can sense a connection to the subject matter in the subtlety with which it\u2019s handled. Anyone who has dealt with the deterioration of a parent will find something resonant in Chika-ura\u2019s film, one that can sometimes feel self-indulgent in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama-movies","tag-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}