One of Imamura’s most daring and original works (and that’s saying a lot), A Man Vanishes is a mind-bending faux documentary (or is it?) about the Japanese phenomenon of johatsu, the frequent, sudden disappearance of businessmen. Beginning in documentary mode, the director sets off to investigate the real-life case of a man named Tadashi Oshima who vanished without a trace two years prior, abandoning job and fiancée. Hayakawa Yoshie is the distraught lover on a mission to find her man, but who soon becomes increasingly enamoured of Imamura’s actor, Tsuyuguchi Shigeru (the rapist from Intentions of Murder), who is aiding her in her search. Consistently praised as being decades before its time, A Man Vanishes "still outshines more recent (and more technically sophisticated) attempts to blur the line between reality and its cinematic facsimile” (Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times). With shocking incisions into the real, Imamura takes us headlong into the caesura of the case, and simultaneously its representation. “A Man Vanishes is an ingeniously constructed and subversively intellectual, yet captivating and elegant rumination on the malleability, inexactness, and ephemeral nature of reality.... It is this interpenetration between reality and the subjectivity of perception, individual will and performance of role, that defines the bold and irreverent spirit of Imamura's inventive and thoughtful exposition on the essential paradox of cinema: a medium that integrally conveys both the representation of real life and its projected imitation” (Aquarello). “Mr. Director, what is Truth?” asks the heroine as the film approaches its denouement. Good question!

Rated PG.