Caught in the fraught battleground of divorce and parental rights, there is usually a child or children hoping their best interests aren’t forgotten. Guillaume Senez’s tender and potent melodrama A Missing Part explores the painful limbo that both parent and child, unable to see each other, finds themselves in after a bitter separation. Told with an endearing humanity, the film wholly believes that if even a parental bond is strained, it can never truly be broken.
Jay (Romain Duris) might be a gaijin, but after more than a decade living in Japan, he’s the one giving directions to lost locals. Taxi cab driver by night, by day he acts as a conduit between lawyer Michiko (Tsuyu) and her French expat clients who find themselves in a similar situation to Jay — trying to reunite with their children following a separation. As Jay knows all too well, Japan’s “clean break” approach essentially affords legal custody to the first parent who claims the child. It’s a legal situation made all the more thorny for parents who may not have full resident status in the country. Jay, who has been searching for his daughter Lily (Mei Cirne-Masuki) for nine years has developed a hardened shell to survive navigating the system, but it’s all new to Jessica (Judith Chemla), Michiko’s latest client. Jessica is a Parisian who will do anything it takes to see her son after her Japanese husband split and suddenly whisked their child to Tokyo. Jay does his best to guide Jessica and help her understand the nuances of Japan’s cultural customs and legal maneuverings, but finds himself struggling to follow his own rules when Lily unexpectedly comes back into his life.
After Wim Wenders’ wildly overrated and idealized, postcard perfect vision of Tokyo in Perfect Days, Senez offers a welcome counterpoint with A Missing Part. The director withholds the problematic Western gaze that soured Wenders’ film and presents a nation of complicated, beautifully flawed, and wholly fascinating characters. Senez and Jean Denizot’s sensitive screenplay is not a condemnation of Japan’s legal system. Rather, they get to the weary, emotional heart of Jay and Jessica’s lives that are stuck in stasis as they try to find some hope in a situation that, try as they might to deny it, is largely hopeless. Plans are pushed back, jobs are lost, and their futures are upended as Genez and cinematographer Elin Kirschfink take us through a city feels lived in, dipping everywhere from the Ichigaya Fishing Center to a wreck-it-room squirreled away on a rooftop.
At fifty years-old Duris’ youthful charm has transformed into a rugged handsomeness that has lost none of its allure, but its pitched differently in a A Missing Part. The beguiling attractiveness that he can turn on and off like a switch is reconfigured to a haggard, world weariness here. It’s a finely tuned performance in which Duris (bouncing between French and fluent Japanese) finds the meeting point in many of Jay’s contradictions: optimism and fear; despair and nonchalance. The melancholy, melodious pop of composer Olivier Marguerit’s score helps underscore the film’s specific tone. And even if the picture may threaten to tilt at times into the saccharine with an overcooked needle drop or the inclusion of a pet monkey for Jay, Senez’s sure hand keeps it from tipping over.
When we finally meet Lily, she’s just as heartbroken as Jay by the years they have been separated, and A Missing Part wisely understands no neat piece of dialogue can patch up lost time. Hope can be a difficult and even delusional place to live, but it’s all Jay and Lily have. And as we leave them, Senez makes us believe that their unlikely path will one day have the storybook ending it deserves.
Director: Guillaume Senez
Screenplay: Guillaume Senez, Jean Denizot
Cast: Romain Duris, Judith Chemla, Mei Cirne-Masuki, Tsuyu, Shungiku Uchida, Yumi Narita, Patrick Descamps, Shinnosuke Abe
Producers: Jacques-Henri Bronckart, David Thion
Cinematography: Elin Kirschfink
Production design: Takeshi Shimizu
Costume design: Julie Lebrun
Editing: Julie Brenta
Music: Olivier Marguerit
Sound: Nicolas Paturle, Virginie Messaien, Sabrina Calmels, Franco Piscopo
Production companies: Les Films Pelléas (France), Versus Production (Belgium)
World sales: Be For Films
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Centrepiece)
In Japanese, French
98 minutes
