Review: A Missing Part
- Guillaume Senez takes Romain Duris to Japan, telling a fine and well-put-together story about parenthood where a father allows himself a final reprieve and in which emotion swells like a wave
In 2018, Guillaume Senez and Romain Duris teamed up to make Our Struggles [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guillaume Senez
film profile], a staggering story about a father confronted with his responsibilities when the mother of his young children disappears. A Missing Part [+see also:
trailer
interview: Guillaume Senez
film profile] - unveiled in a premiere in the Toronto Film Festival’s Centrepiece section – sees them once again exploring the complexity of the father figure, this time through the story of a man who’s separated from his daughter.
A foreigner in the city. The film opens with Jay (Romain Duris) at the wheel of a car criss-crossing the streets of Tokyo at night. Paralysed by loneliness, we soon understand that a string of disappointments have led to him keeping a low profile, that he was only a hair’s breadth from breakdown, and that his announced return to France is a way for him to definitively turn the page on an all-too-painful past. Jay speaks perfect Japanese, he knows the city like the back of his hand, he’s a regular at a sento (a Japanese bath), and he leads a restrained, monastic life. But his status remains that of a Gaijin, a foreigner. When Jessica (Judith Chemla) – a young and distraught French mother whose child has been taken away from her – comes into his life, his balance is upended. He thought he’d left his obsession behind him, happy to silence his emotions and feelings, but he’s swept away by Jessica’s anger and her determination to not just let things happen. Following a random replacement at work, he thinks he crosses paths with his daughter. Against all expectations, he rushes towards a stranger, forgetting all self-control and overstepping a red line in all conscience.
Buoyed by a super-efficient screenplay, composed of little nothings which result in this impossible encounter, taking a chiaro-scuro path towards a resolution that’s as luminous as it is doomed from the outset, A Missing Part explores both a father’s obsession and the irreconcilable otherness of a foreigner or stranger. In his keenness to adapt, Jay has forgotten himself, just like he has been erased from his daughter’s memory. His encounter with Jessica - a kind of inverted mirror reflection of the father he once was - slowly brings back his drive, as if the seams on the suit he’d forced himself to wear were gradually giving way.
Once again, Guillaume Senez depicts a man who returns to form by the grace of female characters who elevate him and help him regain his sight. He films Japan, the reluctant host country of his damaged hero, without fetichism. Jay has done all he can to blend into the masses, but despite being almost more Japanese than the Japanese themselves, he still feels excluded. He’s as rejected by his ex-wife, and therefore by his family, as he is by the social corpus he seeks to integrate. But this failure is pierced by a light which burns brighter and brighter as the film advances, as night replaces day and confiscated child Lily (Mei Cirne-Masuki) takes up her place in the story. And, temporarily, a glimmer of hope and a breath of life filter through all the constraint and reserve, helped by the film’s mise-en-scène, subtle photography, and an original score which experiments with a lyricism which is of sufficient scope to speak to the sparks reawakening within Jay.
A Missing Part sees Guillaume Senez collaborating with Versus Production in Belgium for the very first time, while continuing to work with French producers Les Films Pelléas. International sales are managed by Be For Films.
(Translated from French)
