Movie (2008), 130 minutes
In Japanese with English (and other) subtitles
Director: Yôjirô Takita
Screenplay: Kundo Koyama
This beautifully composed film won an Oscar in 2009 for Best Foreign Language Film, and only a few minutes into it one can see why. The spare loveliness of Japan's plains, rivers, and mountains is set against the totally mundane struggles of a thirty-something cellist, Daigo (Masahiro Motoki), whose orchestra shuts down and leaves him jobless. At about the same time his mother dies in his faraway home town, so he and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), move into his old home--where memories of his long-gone father linger.
Realizing that he's not much of a cellist, anyway, Daigo starts over in a new job. He answers an ad in the local newspaper for "Departures," believing he's applying to a travel agency. Daigo gets hired straight away by his new boss, Sasaki (a taciturn, if not morose, Tsutomu Yamazaki), and he soon learns that the job is about departures, all right, but of the funerary kind: He will be preparing bodies for their "departures" from life. The English subtitles referred to his profession as "encasketing," and some call it "encoffining," but what the job amounts to is prepping and dressing the deceased before cremation.
At first Daigo is reluctant to keep the job, and when Mika learns of it she is repulsed. Gradually, though, Daigo begins to comprehend the simple beauty of the rites he performs and the effect of his work on grieving families. Relatives observe him as he ceremoniously dresses and composes the bodies of the departed, making them as beautiful to look upon as he can, in the moments before they're consigned to the crematory oven. Wry humor often lightens the mood, but Daigo's work is solemn, respectful, careful, and almost devout. It's a cultural side of Japan I've never imagined, and so the film is enlightening in its way. And Daigo doesn't forget his cello. He plays for Sasaki, for Mika, and, I suppose, for the comfort of the familiar.
Some reviewers have called "Departures" whimsical, but you could have fooled me. There's humor, yes, and maybe I took the whole thing too seriously. But when the aging operator fires up the crematory oven on the casket of the town's beloved bath-house keeper, his secret love--and when Daigo lovingly dresses out his re-found but dead father--I don't get the whimsy.
The relatively long run-time for "Departures" put me off at first. Long movie, smallish stories within. But the minutes serve the long ceremonial rites shown. The film doesn't rush the rites but plays them out, in a hush, letting us take time to observe and love both the encasketer and the encasketed. Maybe we're supposed to smile about how much time the Japanese can take for such rites. I can't think why.
This is a beautiful film, with sweet overtones--speaking of the cello--of hope and discovery.
For the trailer, visit http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3454469145/
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