Absence — no matter how great or small — creates mystery. Mystery inspires intrigue or, at the very least, interest. Interest encourages active engagement: we desperately search for missing narrative (or emotional) pieces that help us solve the mysterious absence at the center of a film. Sometimes, doing so is immensely cathartic (see Rian Johnson’s Clue-style mystery Knives Out); other times, it’s quite the opposite (see Lee Chang Dong’s sinisterly surreal Burning). And in another, extremely rare case, it’s somewhat both (see — because director Kei Chika-ura certainly did — Christopher Nolan’s Memento).
Great Absence aspires to do it all. It wants to, as per the introduction for its New York premiere at the 2024 Japan Cuts festival, be “a deeply moving and artfully multi-layered [story] about reconciliation, love, and mortality.” How? By taking a multi-layered approach, of course. First, we get the bottom-most gooey arthouse layer, which relies heavily on ambiguity, ambivalence, and, well, great absence. This gives Chika-ura and co-writer Keita Kumano the poetic license to engineer a tortuously unnecessary nonlinear story with multiple plot strands and gaping narrative holes because, you know, after all, it’s all about the unreliability of memory and the subjective nature of grief. Fine, but if you’re going to go this route, at least commit to it like Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter or the aforementioned Memento. Instead, Great Absence lathers layer upon layer of mystery that its maker conveniently solves himself.
The central — sentimentally indie — layer revolves around Tokyo-based actor Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) solving his frosty relationship with his estranged father Yohji (Tatsuya Fuji), a retired professor now suffering from rapidly progressive dementia. But it’s buried underneath the thick coating of Rashōmon-style mystery: what actually happened to Naomi (Hideko Hara), the woman for whom Yohji abandoned his family 20 years ago? Using Yohji’s dementia as a narrative crutch, the film prolongs this suspense, framing him alternately as a potential murderer, a sexual harasser, and an innocent victim. The purpose: to explain the mystery of how or why the film began with the police barging through his door for making a distress call that eventually led to a reconciliation with his son.
But why overburden this father-son narrative — already replete with absences because of Yohji’s dementia — with a mystery narrative consistently filled with momentum-zapping absences? Chika-ura’s intention is understandable: like Nolan in Memento, he’s using a branching, game-like narrative structure with disruptive narrative ellipses to mimic the character’s confused psychological and emotional state of mind. But which character are we exactly following in Great Absence? For about an hour of its terminally long 133-minute runtime (mercifully now 20 minutes shorter than the 153-minute cut that ran at TIFF last year), it seems like it’s Takashi. But then the film, without any rhyme or reason, omits him entirely from the flashbacks: now, this depiction of the past functions as a truthful alternative to the web of lies that different people are telling Takashi about his father and his relationship with Naomi. But why? Isn’t the whole point of the film — emphasized by its maudlin piano score (seemingly straight out of another misguided emotional puzzle film, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster) that accompanies the most painfully self-important dialogue, made to sound even more self-serious by all the actors — that no matter how much you try to “research a character or understand a person, you wouldn’t find the correct answer”?
Great Absence is emotionally vague enough to justify its self-contradictory storytelling as profoundly poetic. It wants to ride a wavelength of “Aren’t we all just searching for answers when there are none?” Well, no, we’re not. Or at least, with regard to the film at hand, this writer is not, as its constant attempts at soul-searching for mysterious absences through narrative overload only make emphasizes its essential, damning absences: of intrigue, mystery, emotion, and intellect.
DIRECTOR: Kei Chika-ura; CAST: Mirai Moriyama, Tatsuya Fuhi, Hideko Nara, Yôko Maki; DISTRIBUTOR: Gaga; IN THEATERS: July 19; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 13 min.
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