The things we do for our children

As they said at the end of Hell or High WaterSometimes we do crazy things for our children. In the last year, in fact, two of the most talked-about films feature a father on an epic quest to find his lost daughter: Sirado and One battle after another, with a classic narrative structure that comes from Desert Centaurs, clear. A daughter in Tokyo It has less of a sense of adventure and more of injustice, but it's also about a father who does strange things to find his daughter. In this case, working as a taxi driver in Tokyo for nine years (a Frenchman in Japan: a curious and unusual approach to immigration issues) hoping to stumble across her someday, perhaps hailing a fare on a street corner in the Japanese capital.

Romain Duris plays this taxi driver, a former cook, a victim of Japanese law that doesn't allow for shared custody in a separation, no matter how much the mother also desires it. The film is only as good as his performance. In an almost Zen-like register, full of subtleties and blind spots (the character is hardly a saint), this taxi driver could easily strike up a friendship with the protagonist of Perfect daysAnd when he finds his daughter again (not a spoiler, it happens in the first third of the film) and makes an effort to reconnect, with the Toni Erdmann, another film about clumsy parents who do strange things to avoid losing the bond with their offspring.