‘A Missing Part’: Seville Review

Dir: Guillaume Senez. France/Belgium. 2024. 98 mins

Belgian director Guillaume Senez’s third feature A Missing Part is fundamentally a story about child custody, but much more besides. Featuring an intense performance by Romain Duris as a French taxi driver in Japan in search of a daughter estranged from him by the law, this low-key, carefully crafted and involving tale is also a drama about immigration from a western perspective. Having premiered at Toronto and now in competition in Seville, further berths seem likely for a film whose director comes with a strong record of festival success (Our Struggles, Keeper).

Duris delivers a potent, controlled performance 

Separated from his Japanese wife Keiko (Yumi Narita), Frenchman Jay (Duris) works the night shift, driving round a Tokyo whose illuminated nightscapes are presented by DoP Elin Kirschfink as alien and unfriendly; much like Jay’s other experiences of the city. We first meet him offering a shoulder to cry on to the understandably frantic Jessica (Judith Chemla), who – under a striking Japanese law that states that custody of a child goes to just one of the parents  – is about to fall out of contact with her son. (The law is set to change and allow joint custody from 2026.)

For nine years Jay has been a victim of the same law: formerly a cook, he has become a taxi driver in the forlorn hope that one day he might encounter his daughter Lily (Mei Cirne-Masuki). One day, Jay is assigned a school run and Lily climbs into the back – or at least we think it’s Lily. The scenes in which Jay discreetly seeks to establish whether the 12 year-old sitting behind him is his daughter are well executed, and finally, in a moment of potent catharsis, he’s able to confirm her identity. As Lily, Mei Cirne-Masuki is terrific in their scenes together: though she’s initially shy and silent, the viewer ends up with no doubt whatsoever about how she feels about the situation in which she has suddenly found herself. 

Taciturn and careful about his life to the point of dullness – his only concession to eccentricity is that he keeps a monkey called Jean-Pierre – Jay is rejuvenated after meeting Lily. And there are even suggestions of a future relationship with Jessica. But it’s not enough; Jay wishes to spend time with his daughter, and here he runs into stiff opposition, not only from Keiko and her mother, but also from his employer and the legal system of a country where he remains very much an outsider. 

Though the script is careful to establish that Japanese custody law applies to Japanese citizens as well as foreigners, A Missing Part is also about the alienation and vulnerability of a stranger in a strange land. Little scenes confirming Jay’s outsider status mount up. What drives Jay forward, and what drives the viewer’s interest in him, is not merely the film’s plot, but the fact that he is in an authentically tragic quandary. 

One of the film’s strengths is that details of Jay’s obsession which might in another context feel uncomfortable – the way he follows Lily to a swimming pool, or maintains her bedroom, unchanged and unclean, for nine years, risking his job to continue seeing her – come over as understandable. His anxious attempt to win the marine-loving Lily over (a toy octopus he hangs from his rear-view mirror, a book about eels) border on the heartbreaking. 

Duris, reprising with Senez after their similarly intense family drama Our Struggles, delivers a potent, controlled performance whose self-containment always feels threatened by the possibility of explosion. To this extent, Jay reflects the film itself – its leanness, tautness, and efficiency will, we feel, be unable to contain the messiness of the emotions carrying it along, and the result is tense and very rewarding.