‘Great Absence’ Review: An Actor Searches for the Truth About His Dying Father in Kei Chika-ura’s Raw and Exquisite Dementia Drama

If every terminal illness arrives too soon, dementia is the only one that often seems to arrive too late at the same time — if not for the person suffering from it, then at least for the people they’ve already left behind. Therein lies the essence of its exquisite cruelty: By the time Alzheimer’s (or any similar affliction) reveals itself, it can already be too late to protect against what it takes from you. Too late to mend fences. Too late to ask questions. Too late to say the words you’ve always needed a loved one to hear, or hear the words you’ve always needed a loved one to say.

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The shadow of death can be so beautiful for the clarity that comes with it, but dementia rolls in like an endless mist — it taunts you to search for answers with a newfound sense of urgency, only to laugh as you get lost grasping at shadows in the fog.

Until science finds a solution for that problem, art will have to suffice as our best revenge. As a veritable memory machine, the movies have never been especially well-suited to stories of forgetting (which helps to explain why so many exceptions to that rule, from “ The Father ” and “Memento” to “The Act of Killing,” tend to rely on elaborate conceits). And yet, no other medium is more equipped to capture the strange — but all too familiar — vertigo of feeling like someone is here and not here at the same time. No other medium so viscerally articulates the four-dimensionality of a flat image, or does as much to invite the past back into conversation with the present (and vice-versa) the way that it is in our own minds.

Kei Chika-ura’s tightly knotted — but quietly immense — “Great Absence” speaks to that point through its formal restraint. “Realism” wouldn’t be the right word for a hyper-composed film that embraces the full weight of its 35mm camera while hopscotching around its timeline with the reckless abandon of an errant thought, but it helps to convey the steady pulse of a semi-autobiographical drama that’s less interested in how lifelike film can be than it is in how filmic life already is.

A far, far cry from the tearjerker it would appear to be on paper, Kei Chika-ura’s tenderly moving tribute to his dad tells the story of a mid-level Tokyo actor who only starts trying to understand his long-estranged father after the old man has begun to lose any sense of himself. Not that Takashi (Moriyama Mirai) ever had a clear idea of who Yohji was in the first place (he’s played by “In the Realm of the Senses” legend Fuji Tatsuya, whose rich screen history reflects hidden multitudes of his own).

Takashi remembers his dad as a dedicated X-ray scientist whose persona was far less transparent than his work, which might have something to do with why Takashi grew up to express himself for a living. Whatever the case, the two men haven’t seen much of each other since Yohji left Takashi’s late mother some 25 years ago in order to start a new life with another woman named Naomi (Hara Hideko), though — in a film whose discombobulating structure reflects the achronological experience of living with acute dementia — it’s hard to say when Takashi discovered the dirty truth about his parents’ divorce. Was it during the strained but civil afternoon we see in an undesignated flashback, when Takashi and his producer wife Yuki (Maki Yoko) paid a rare visit to Kitakyushu? Or does he not learn about that until later, when Naomi’s son comes around to ask for money?

Such questions have never really mattered all that much to Takashi, and Moriyama’s mask-like affect makes him a perfect screen onto which Kei might beam his own emotions — a phenomenon made literal by the scenes in which Takashi rehearses a performance of Eugène Ionesco’s “Exit the King” in front of a massive rear-projection of his own face. Those questions only begin to stoke Takashi’s curiosity after Yohji is rendered incapable of answering them; after Yohji accidentally summons a SWAT team to his house, and the authorities call Takashi to come visit his father in the facility where he’ll spend the rest of his time on Earth.

Suddenly, Naomi’s disappearance strikes Takashi as a mystery in need of solving, and all the more so after Yohji insists that his second wife — so sweet and caringly devoted to her husband’s needs — cut her own throat with a pair of kitchen scissors. That would be easier for Takashi to accept at face value if not for the other expressions of Yohji’s dementia, which render him paranoid and constantly in search of his watch, among other classic symptoms of the disease.

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Like all who suffer from such a condition, Yohji believes in his reality with the same conviction that we believe in our own, and the magic of Fuji’s multi-layered performance stems from his steadfast refusal to convince people of anything his character “knows” to be true. But Takashi knows that Naomi is alive somewhere, but understanding why she left will force him to make sense of why she was with Tohji in the first place, which in turn will lead him to uncover the hidden depths of a man whose absence from his life had always seemed like a sufficient answer to any of the questions it stirred up.

In another film, that process of discovery might lead to a series of dramatic reveals and last-ditch bonding moments; it would cleave a lot closer to the ending of “The Notebook” than it does to the much subtler truth of how we storify the people we’ve lost (a reality that “Great Absence” underscores on a meta-textual level from the moment it starts). Kei, however, is less interested in the particulars of Tohji’s inner life than he is in Takashi’s gradual recognition that his father even had an inner life. Only by watching Tohji’s mind erode is Takashi convinced of the richness that it may once have contained, a subtle awakening which leads to the quietly infinite realization that Tohji was so much more than the man his son ever got the chance to know — in ways both good and bad.

“Great Absence” isn’t quite as allergic to sentiment as this slow and steady film might seem on the surface, and it’s prone to metaphor in a way that a less honest story would never be able to survive, but Kei is committed to keeping things at the same even keel as Yamazaki Yutaka’s locked-off cinematography (Yamazaki frequently shoots for Hirokazu Kore-eda, another filmmaker who finds great poetry in the unfussy rhythms of real life). He refuses to let Yohji be reduced to a dramatic function, and his film invites our sympathies while rejecting our value judgments.

In one scene, Takashi is astonished to learn that his father had a fierce romantic streak. In the next, it’s suggested that his Tohji’s passion for Naomi didn’t stop him from treating her like a glorified housekeeper, an accusation that Kei lobbies at the character as part of his film’s sharp but glancing look at how certain gender roles might respond to the world’s most rapidly aging population (it’s implied that Yohji’s symptoms might have been disguised by his patriarchal behavior). By design, these episodes will never add up to a cohesive whole that might reveal the full truth of who Yohji was. As Yohji says himself when discussing his son’s role in a historical drama: “Playing someone who really existed in the past wouldn’t be fun at all, because if you think you found the right answer you’d only be deceiving yourself.”

Self-deception is a key piece of any dementia drama (including this one), but “Great Absence” — despite its resistance to a conventional dramatic flow — is sustained by how truthfully Yohji’s condition forces Takashi to poke holes in the story he’s always told himself about his father. And when the violins finally swell during the film’s plaintive anticlimax they don’t underscore an emotional breakthrough so much as they mourn the faint depths of feeling that Yohji kept hidden for so long, and might have taken to his grave if not for his son’s last-minute compulsion to dredge them to the surface.

He’ll never be able to solve the mystery, but sometimes it’s enough to know that there is a mystery to be solved. People are never really gone, and in some cases — this raw and deeply rewarding film argues in its most breathtaking shot — their absence only begins to abate when then they’re no longer with us, and they reveal themselves to us like a path through the ocean that can only be seen after the tide goes out. It’s never too late to see it.

Grade: B+

Picturehouse will release “Great Absence” in theaters on Friday, July 19.