Belgian filmmaker Guillaume Senez has always been fascinated with his protagonists’ personal responsibility amidst family dynamics. From his debut feature Keeper to his sophomore outing Our Struggles, Senez’s eye for complicated relationships always comes to the fore. His latest film, A Missing Part (Une part manquante), follows this trend, reuniting the director with actor Romain Duris to tell a story of a father’s struggle to reconnect with his estranged daughter in a place that doesn’t take too kindly to foreigners like him.
A Missing Part begins with Frenchman Jay (Duris) driving around Tokyo at night. A local taxi driver asks him for directions to a new place that the GPS can’t locate, and the French ex-pat helps him in fluent Japanese. Quickly we learn more about Jay. Working as a driver for a private car service by night, he frequents a bathhouse by day, teaches a local Japanese store owner basic French lessons, and keeps a low profile.
Just before he takes a nap from his night shift, Jay receives a call from a lawyer friend (Tsuyu Shimizu) to help a young French woman named Jessica (Judith Chemla), who’s distraught at having her young child taken away from her. While comforting her in vain, Jay suddenly feels the need to guide her through her ordeal.
This meeting between two gaijins (foreigners) is a brilliant touch from Senez, as it means the film doesn’t have to burden its audience with backstories or flashbacks to understand Jay’s predicament. Instead, through Jessica’s developing situation, we understand that he’s no stranger to it: In the nine years since he has separated from his wife, Jay has never been able to get custody of his daughter Lily. Ever since, he has used his occupation to travel the length and breadth of Tokyo in his cab, looking for his daughter. “I dreamed of it, okay?” he intimates to Jessica about finding Lily. “But in a city of 40 million…”
While there are other people who are sympathetic to his plight, Jay’s status as a foreigner compounds the already-restrictive family law system in Japan, particularly concerning child custody and parental rights after divorce. As a result of the country’s “clean break” approach alongside its sole custody system, a parent may be unable to contact their child after a divorce, even after paying alimony. This explains why Jay hasn’t agreed to a divorce, something he advises Jessica not to do either. And with a perceived bias favouring the Japanese over gaijins, Jay is subject to a legal system that provides few rights to foreign parents like him.
This also explains his low key existence, as one small mistake could mean he’d likely face either jail time or deportation. Still, nine years is a long time; and Jay, having given up hope of ever seeing Lily again, finally decides to move back to France, contacting a broker to sell his house and calling his doting father who had been waiting for ages for his son to come home.
A few days before his planned departure, however, Jay is asked to cover for a colleague who is out sick. The passenger who hops into his cab is a young girl (Mei Cirne-Masuki) who, as the film reveals, is about the same age as Jay’s daughter. As the girl is approached by her classmates, Jay hears one of them call her by her name: Lily. Could it be his Lily? Suddenly, a wave of emotion sweeps him, threatening to upend his routine and structured way of life by crossing a road he’s long thought of crossing but which he never did.
When I saw Our Struggles a few years ago, I was mesmerised by Duris’ affecting portrayal of a hardworking father who was left to navigate the overwhelming responsibilities of single parenthood in the wake of his wife’s unexplained disappearance. And while A Missing Part sees both Senez and Duris revisiting familiar territory, this time it’s through the story of a man who’s forcibly separated from his daughter.
From a screenplay he co-wrote with Jean Denizot, Senez has a way with populating his world with strong female supporting characters that give his films more depth and authenticity. In this film, even Jay’s confrontation with his ex-wife and mother-in-law feels raw and real. As an audience, we feel a secondhand embarrassment from having to listen to them shouting and arguing in public.
Cirne-Masuki’s quiet performance as Lily also goes perfectly well with Duris’ frustrated Jay. Their moments together, from the tentative conversations in the car to the detour they make one day, show the chemistry between the two actors. At the same time, we hear Olivier Marguerit’s film score — at first minimalist and dissonant to befit Jay’s state of mind, and then utilising bright and lush orchestration — which aims to tug at the heartstrings and signal a glimmer of hope. We, in turn, immediately get invested in the father-daughter duo, wishing for Jay to find the answers he’s looking for, and for young Lily to ask the questions she never even thought of.
Having said all that, one of the film’s standout aspects to me is the use of its setting as an unforgiving host, and that’s credit to Senez’s smart direction. For the longest time, we’ve seen Western films overly fascinated with exoticising Asian countries by obstinately portraying the iconography of a particular place. With A Missing Part, such fetishism is thankfully absent. Instead, Senez uses a deglamorized Tokyo as the backdrop to great effect, allowing the city to emerge as a character in its own right. And with the urban landscape mirroring Jay’s estrangement and alienation, the film emphasises his growing sense of disconnect from a world that has always felt foreign to him.
