Takashi, an actor based in Tokyo, receives troubling news about his father Yohji while preparing for a new role. Yohji, whom Takashi has been estranged from for years, lives alone in southern Japan. However, when the police respond to a call at Yohji’s home, they find the elderly man confused and his longtime partner Naomi missing.
Reluctantly, Takashi and his wife Yuki, who supports his career, travel to see Yohji. They discover he has dementia and must now live in a care facility. But questions remain around Naomi’s disappearance. As Takashi searches for clues with Yuki’s help, he also reflects on the broken bond with his father.
The mystery is just one thread in director Kei Chikaura’s tapestry. His nonlinear narrative unfolds the family’s history through flashes of memory. This structure mirrors the disorienting reality of dementia. Acclaimed actors like Mirai Moriyama as Takashi and legendary Tatsuya Fuji bring nuance to troubled characters. Chikaura crafts an intimate drama exploring reconciliation, secrets, and how the cruelty of aging distorts relationships.
While sometimes languid in pacing, Chikaura’s deliberate pace rewards patience. He avoids superficial emotional manipulation, instead presenting conflicts realistically with melancholy atmospherics crafted by masterful cinematography. Great Absence offers moving insights into loss, regret, and how loved ones live on imperfectly through fractured memory. Both poetic and profoundly human, this understated gem deserves to be discovered.
Unraveling Family Secrets
The story follows Takashi as he responds to a strange situation with his estranged father, Yohji. Police found the elderly man alone and confused at home, and his partner Naomi was nowhere to be found. Takashi travels with his wife Yuki to figure out what happened.
They discover Yohji now lives in a care facility with dementia. As Takashi searches Yohji’s home for answers, the film reveals their history through flashbacks between past and present. This nonlinear technique mirrors the fragmented way those with dementia recall memories. It also allows emotional conflicts to emerge naturally rather than relying on shocks.
We learn Takashi and Yohji were long estranged after Yohji left his first family. Naomi then devoted decades to caring for Yohji, though their relationship held complexities. As dementia takes its toll, Takashi finds Naomi’s diary detailing a deep love that counters his memory of her as an overworked partner.
Central themes include the difficulty of reconnection when one suffers cognitive decline. Family dynamics emerge through a dysfunctional father-son bond now challenged by secrets of the past. Aging and its cruel robberies also factor in, as memory loss distorts relationships and denies closure.
Rather than give facile answers, the film groundedly presents reconciliation and forgiveness as complicated. Dementia impacts not just the patient but distressed loved ones revising their understanding of the past. Throughout, the story avoids predictable plot twists in favor of thoughtful character study.
Faces of Family
The central characters in Great Absence experience profound development. Takashi enters with deep resentment towards his father, Yohji, having cut ties years ago. But responding to Yohji’s situation awakens curiosity about revisiting their past.
Yohji remains an enigma, his flaws evident yet understood as symptoms rather than character flaws. The development of dementia unravels his sense of self and grip on reality. Fujis’ subtle work depicts a man clinging to independence despite emerging neediness.
Naomi too holds complex layers beyond the homemaker façade. Her diary unveils a once-passionate woman, hopes eroding as mental illness warped her partner. Her absence leaves unfinished business, adding poetic tragedy.
Moriyama excels at showing Takashi slowly exposing his hardened shell. Initial duty evolves into empathy and care as truth emerges. His bond with supportive wife Yuki, perfectly portrayed by Maki, strengthens through facing family demons together.
But it’s Fuji who anchors the film with his emotionally gripping performance. Understated yet powerfully expressive, he imbues Yohji with a forlorn childlike quality even as anger surfaces. His visceral portrayal makes a formidable final role all the more poignant.
Together, this talented cast breathes life into complex, compassionately written characters. Their nuanced work carries the film’s meditative tones on memory, loss, and family’s capacity for both wounding and healing.
A Director’s Deft Touch
Kei Chikaura guides the film with subtle mastery. His intentional tempo allows absorbing each character’s inner world. Scenes shift between past and present in disorienting yet effectively dislodging ways, granting insight into fractured recollections.
Chikaura populates an unsettled but poetic atmosphere. Sparse musical accompaniment lets piercing silence underscore isolation. Master cinematographer Yutaka Yamazaki frames souls in their environments—even nature flourishes carry melancholy fitting the story.
Beauty emerges from realism in Yamazaki’s inspired photography. Landscapes showcase seasonal cycles paramount to themes of flux. Within homes, clutter depicts the mind, but order remains through Chikaura’s vision.
Under his direction, mystery subverts expectations. Documents hinting at trauma build not to shock, instead posing existential queries. Chikaura invites meditating on memory’s manipulation and how relationships evolve over eras beyond surface comprehension.
Fundamental emotions resonate from technique. Experienced storytellers like Chikaura wield craft finely to magnify humanity. In Great Absence, technique serves insights into life’s profound mysteries, which defy pat revelations.
Broken bonds, healing hearts
Beneath polite facades, Yohji and Takashi’s relationship festered for decades. Flashbacks reveal the root—Yohji’s brash disregard drove their wedge deeper yearly. Naomi witnessed how her romance transformed an eager lover warping with mental illness into someone unrecognizable.
Peeling back layers, Takashi gains a fuller picture of his parents’ dynamic. Through trauma, Naomi found solace in dutifully caring for a man increasingly difficult to love. Her diary unveiled passions that endured despite his flaws—a testament to love’s resilience.
Forgiveness requires will beyond expectations. Great Absence explores how individual trauma shapes one’s capacity for redemption. Takashi gradually lets down defenses, gaining empathy for his father’s fading grip on himself. Yuki’s stalwart support eases his journey.
Their marriage serves as a beacon. During hardship, compassion strengthens what resentments may strain. By standing with Takashi through this family reckoning, their bond blossoms anew—a poignant reminder that love elevates us above past pains.
In prioritizing characters over shocks, Chikaura’s narrative finds truth deeper than surface manipulations. This family’s wounds appear small beside their persevering humanity, a subtle yet profound lesson for all reckoning with life’s complexities.
A masterful team effort
Great Absence sees Kei Chikaura wears many hats with great care. Not only did he write and direct this poignant drama, his experiences clearly informed the personal touches. But it was a strong team allowing his vision to resonate so deeply.
The cast delivered emotionally raw performances perfectly balancing subtlety and potency. In complex roles tackling touchy subject matters, each actor shone with natural brilliance. From seasoned talents like Fuji to newcomers, all seemed perfectly attuned to Chikaura’s subtle storytelling.
Meanwhile, Koji Itoyama’s minimal score accompanied without distracting. His melancholic tones fluidly complemented the visual atmosphere Yutaka Yamazaki enveloped scenes in. As Koreeda’s trusted cinematographer, Yamazaki crafted each shot with care and intimacy.
Chikaura’s characters evolve in a step-wise yet deft manner through the script. Layer by layer, their humanity emerged alongside the unraveling mystery. Story points gradually built towards poignant resolutions over gratuitous shocks.
Clearly, this stemmed from Chikaura’s delicate touch as a filmmaker committed to honoring personal experience. Through a harmonious team effort, Great Absence achieves beauty, addressing life’s profound complexities.
Family’s Lingering Echoes
Kei Chikaura’s Great Absence resonates long after by prioritizing character over shock. Unfolding like fragments from the minds of those deteriorating and those desperate to understand, it explores family and illness with subtle grace.
Takashi’s journey epitomizes how confronting past wounds evolves strangers into loved ones. Fuji etches Yohji’s demise with nuance that pain transcends pillaging memory alone. Their fractured bond typifies what lingers beyond what’s said—or no longer can be.
Chikaura trusts audiences’ patience rewards. Poetic clues reconstruct lives’ delicate heft over bombast. Lingering on what’s unspoken and unseen, it values viewers pondering life’s subsurface complexities.
Through talented performers’ lived-in roles and visuals imbuing warmth into stark realities, Great Absence imprints familial nostalgia and loss. Its unmarried melodrama honors humanity surfacing even through turmoil. Memory itself warps, but relationships’ echoes resound forever, however distorted through time.
Patient souls immersed find reflections of relationships’ resilience, redemption’s challenges, and memories’ aftertones long after final scenes fade. For perceiving life’s profound mysteries, Great Absence lingers as a quietly moving tribute.
The Review
Great Absence
Kei Chikaura's Great Absence proves that complicated personal dramas focusing on character over plot can offer profound meditations on family, memory, and the human condition. With natural performances and poetic storytelling, it lingers in the mind long after by prioritizing emotional nuance over hollow shock value.
PROS
- Nuanced performances that feel lived-in
- Thoughtful exploration of familial relationships and themes of memory, loss, and redemption
- Poetic narrative unfolds mysteries in a meditative manner over shock value
- Lyrical visuals and minimal score enhance atmosphere
- Rewards patience with subtle emotional complexity
CONS
- Slow pace may test fewer patient viewers
- Disjointed nonlinear structure challenges narrative momentum at points
- Excessive length even in cut version
