A Girl Missing (Kôji Fukada, 2019)

For a film so concerned with formal control, A Girl Missing is really very undisciplined. For awhile now I've been intending to dip into the work of Kôji Fukada, who as become a "name" on the festival circuit in recent years. But just looking at the reviews, and even the descriptions, of these films, they haven't exactly been enticing. I got the sense that Fukada was someone interested in applying austerity and gamesmanship to scenarios that were actually rather conventional, and A Girl Missing does kind of bear this out. It's a film that has quite a lot going on, but because of Fukada's insistence of trying everything he can think of, its potential is diluted, if not completely hobbled.

The story itself is the kind of complex interpersonal intrigue that one often finds in Atom Egoyan films. Ichiko (Mariko Tsutsui) is a dedicated in-home nurse working for the Oishi family, caring for their infirm matriarch (Hisako Ôkata). Ichiko also tutors the family's two daughters, winsome Saki (Miyu Ozawa) and dour, tomboyish Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa). By random circumstance, Ichiko brings the girls into contact with her young adult nephew Tatsuo (Ren Sudo), who kidnaps and possibly rapes Saki. This casts guilt on Ichiko, although it is her decision not to tell the girls' mother (Nahoko Kawasumi) about her connection to Tatsuo that truly incriminates her.

Within this relatively straightforward plot, Fukada layers a number of complicated subtexts and formal maneuvers. The film begins with a slightly older Ichiko going to a salon and getting her hair done by Kazumichi (Sôsuke Ikematsu), and she rather aggressively befriends the young man. Although it takes a minute to recognize it, A Girl Missing operates in two temporal registers. The kidnapping and its fallout occur in a recent past, whereas Ichiko's interactions with Kazumichi exist in the film's present-tense. Ichiko's different hair styles are the primary signifier as to which timeline we are watching at any given time.

This time structure is not a problem in itself. But there seems to be little thematic necessity for this approach. (Granted, it does eventually reveal a secret motive on Ichiko's part, which turns the two-tiered diegesis into a bit of a parlor trick.) One could imagine that had Fukada made the time structure more overt, he could have used it as a way to explore Ichiko's trauma and regret. But as it is, A Girl Missing strikes me as a glib exercise in audience misdirection. Similarly, the film's occasional dips into fantasy, absurdism, and fragmented point of view are insufficiently threaded throughout the film, making it seem as if Fukada is simply trying everything he can think of to make A Girl Missing a serious work of art. 

While he is busy playing around with odd filmic techniques, he mostly fails to explore the deep sexual implications of the family plot. Repression and fear of perversion are the engines that power A Girl Missing, but this is mostly left as a vague, inarticulate miasma, almost as though Fukada himself were incapable of grappling with the implications of his own material. A Girl Missing suggests that Fukada has the potential to become a significant filmmaker, but he needs to streamline his ideas if he wants them to have any real impact.