Romain Duris, one of France’s biggest stars, is the main reason to see the new movie, A Missing Part, which opens Thursday in theaters throughout Israel.
Duris combines stunning good looks with acting skills that enable him to give moving performances whenever he gets a role with real depth.
If you’ve seen French movies over the last 20 years, you have seen Duris. He was the pianist drawn into a life of crime in The Beat that My Heart Skipped; Aramis in the recent Three Musketeers films; the hero in Eiffel, a biopic about the famous architect; a Frenchman in New York’s downtown art scene in Chinese Puzzle; and you can guess who he played in Heartbreaker.
In A Missing Part, directed by Guillaume Senez, he portrays a French father in Japan, cruelly separated from his daughter after he and her Japanese mother split up. The longing of men for their children, whom they are prevented from seeing enough, or at all, following divorce and separation, is a subject we have seen relatively little of on screen, compared to movies about fathers who abandon their offspring.
But both kinds of fathers exist, and here, Duris gives an understated performance as Jerome, who discovers to his horror that as a foreigner, he has no legal right to see his toddler daughter at all when he and her mother split up, even though he never misses a child support payment.
Forget joint custody: Although the girl’s mother made no complaint against him being abusive or neglectful, Jerome is simply not allowed any access to his daughter. Japanese courts, we learn, typically award custody to one parent; the other, even if he or she is Japanese, simply has no right to see the child.
This situation involving Japanese law and foreign parents affects relatively few people, but Duris elevates this story from a movie-of-the-week drama to something more universal, as he shows us his pain over a loss that he cannot accept.
A father's dream of reuniting with his daughter
He is a chef and a children’s book author, but he has stayed in Japan and has been working as a cab driver for nine years, hoping to find a way to see his daughter, Lily (Mei Cirne-Masuki), who is now an adolescent.
She and her mother (Tsuyu Shimizu) have vanished somewhere in Japan, and he has not laid eyes on his daughter in nearly a decade. When Jerome is not working, he spends his time in a support group for parents deprived of seeing their children.
The situation has worn him down, and he counsels others, like Jessica (Judith Chemla, who was in the Israeli movie, The End of Love), to send gifts to their child and plead politely with the custodial parent to see their child occasionally.
Jessica has just stumbled into this situation, and her anger is raw and on the surface. He tries to help her numb herself to the law’s unfairness, as he has, and to hope for crumbs.
When she drops off a stuffed animal for her child at her Japanese husband’s workplace, and begs for a photo of the child, she receives a picture of the back of the boy’s head and freaks out when she realizes the depths of her predicament.
The culture clash of a rule-oriented society, when it comes into conflict with emotional needs, is at the core of the screenplay.
I traveled once to Japan and was bowled over by the kindness I experienced from the locals, so it’s interesting to see this other facet of that society. This shows a drab side of Tokyo, not the glittering shopping districts and picturesque temples that tourists visit.
Jerome is about to give up and finally sell his house, where he has kept his daughter’s room waiting for her all these years, when his daughter gets into his cab.
This isn’t a spoiler; it’s in the trailer, and he begins to drive her regularly to school because she has broken her ankle and cannot take the subway, as she usually does.
She has no idea who he is, and being so close to her releases all the emotions he has tried to push down. But while he is so close to her during these chance meetings in his cab, he still has no right to see her.
Duris gives a masterful performance as this man crippled by grief, longing, and powerlessness, and A Missing Part is touching, even if you are not invested in this issue, which has apparently been resolved to a certain extent recently.