Departures (2009)
An unemployed cellist finds a new lease of life tending to the newly dead in this Japanese comedy-drama, winner of 2009's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar
Death provides the key to life in this multi-award-winning drama about a young musician derailed by his own sense of shame and failure. Director Yôjirô Takita, formerly responsible for cheeky softcore sex comedies and Samurai epic When The Last Sword Is Drawn, approaches another great Japanese taboo - death - from his own bone-dry, deadpan perspective.
Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is the modest cellist in a big city orchestra who finds himself out of a job and mired in debt when the orchestra suddenly closes. With his young wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) he returns to his home town in the countryside where, more or less by accident, he takes a job as an 'encoffineer', ritually preparing the bodies of the recently deceased for cremation. For his wife and the townsfolk it's a shameful profession but as Daigo undertakes - literally - the daily task of cleaning, dressing and beautifying the dead, his sense of disengagement recedes, thanks in part to the eccentric presence of his avuncular boss Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki).
For Mika though, the indignity is insurmountable. She threatens to leave Daigo if he doesn't find another job, and when he declines to look elsewhere she goes. Winter steals over the little town and death carries on as normal, Daigo lovingly preparing the suicides, crash victims, young and old for their final journey through the crematorium. Then comes spring and a sense of rebirth, first in the reappearance of a pregnant Mika and then in news about Daigo's father, whom he hasn't seen since he was a kid nearly 30 years ago.
For Westerners it's tempting to read into Departures a quiet comment on the stigma associated with death in Japanese society. It's only by acknowledging the inevitable, after all, that the aimless and alienated Daiga reconnects with a vanished sense of purpose. Takita's film was inspired by Shimon Aoki's memoir 'Coffinman: The Journal Of A Buddhist Mortician' and the melan-comic humour hovers, Zen-like, between a sense of the reverent and the ridiculous. The encoffineer's meticulously observed ceremonies are part silver-service, part performance art, the awkwardness of the scenario neatly caught in a scene where Daiga and Saskia discover that the corpse of the beautiful young woman to which they're so gently attending turns out to be a cross-dressing bloke.
If there's a fault it's in a lack of urgency in the first half, and a creeping suspicion that the final scenes nudge viewers a little too forcefully towards a teary denouement. The almost-arch self-awareness - so essential for the deadpan tone - eventually drains the story of some of its power. But these are minor objections to a tender, touching film, deftly underplayed by Masahiro Motoki whose sad-eyed, sympathetic demeanour provides Departures its soul.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is the modest cellist in a big city orchestra who finds himself out of a job and mired in debt when the orchestra suddenly closes. With his young wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) he returns to his home town in the countryside where, more or less by accident, he takes a job as an 'encoffineer', ritually preparing the bodies of the recently deceased for cremation. For his wife and the townsfolk it's a shameful profession but as Daigo undertakes - literally - the daily task of cleaning, dressing and beautifying the dead, his sense of disengagement recedes, thanks in part to the eccentric presence of his avuncular boss Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki).
For Mika though, the indignity is insurmountable. She threatens to leave Daigo if he doesn't find another job, and when he declines to look elsewhere she goes. Winter steals over the little town and death carries on as normal, Daigo lovingly preparing the suicides, crash victims, young and old for their final journey through the crematorium. Then comes spring and a sense of rebirth, first in the reappearance of a pregnant Mika and then in news about Daigo's father, whom he hasn't seen since he was a kid nearly 30 years ago.
For Westerners it's tempting to read into Departures a quiet comment on the stigma associated with death in Japanese society. It's only by acknowledging the inevitable, after all, that the aimless and alienated Daiga reconnects with a vanished sense of purpose. Takita's film was inspired by Shimon Aoki's memoir 'Coffinman: The Journal Of A Buddhist Mortician' and the melan-comic humour hovers, Zen-like, between a sense of the reverent and the ridiculous. The encoffineer's meticulously observed ceremonies are part silver-service, part performance art, the awkwardness of the scenario neatly caught in a scene where Daiga and Saskia discover that the corpse of the beautiful young woman to which they're so gently attending turns out to be a cross-dressing bloke.
If there's a fault it's in a lack of urgency in the first half, and a creeping suspicion that the final scenes nudge viewers a little too forcefully towards a teary denouement. The almost-arch self-awareness - so essential for the deadpan tone - eventually drains the story of some of its power. But these are minor objections to a tender, touching film, deftly underplayed by Masahiro Motoki whose sad-eyed, sympathetic demeanour provides Departures its soul.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com