Cast: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki

Director: Yojiro Takita

Screenplay: Kundo Koyama

Running time: 2 hrs 10 mins

Genre: Drama/Foreign



CRITIQUE:


When the unknown, unseen and unheard of Japanese drama Departures clamped down on last season’s Oscar Best Foreign Film, elbowing out the superb docu-animated Waltz with Bashir and Palme D’Or winner The Class, almost everyone had their eyebrows raised – all except Yojiro Takita who received the award with a rather humbled speech, in a gibberish Japanese-accented English that amused the American audience. Those who doubt its triumph can carry on doubting. Those who have seen Departures, consider yourself fortunate. This fascinating, wonderful, elegiac film about death and the art of sending-off, Japanese style, is so far 2009’s most satisfying and moving film. For a movie that swims the undercurrents of morbid subject matters (death, dying, encoffinment), it manages to teeter between lightness and the deep and profound. See the film’s opening sequence; amateur encoffiner Kobayashi prepares the body of a girl only to find the humour in the most morbid and gloomy of scenes. This is something that we somehow understand in the Japanese culture and how they handle the dead. Living people become easily put-off by such job, and the audience equally share the reaction of those that surround the central protagonist. But as we follow his tale and witness the procedure that unfolds, the fascination becomes engrossing, and even heartbreakingly poignant. The encoffinment scenes are the most remarkable to watch, Kobayashi and his boss performing the final acts of care and affection that the dead deserve, it’s almost like a performance to be in awe with, the precision is affecting, the tenderness is beautiful. Yet despite of the many departures that we witness in the film, this is a story of personal redemption, with Kobayashi learning the face the bitter truths of his past, his father’s absence for 30 years, and his acceptance of life’s most natural event, which is death. The characters around him are even well-observed: the loving wife, the wise boss, and the emotionally wounded secretary. That Oscar win is very much deserved.



VERDICT:

Departures has the gentility of a sonata but with the emotional force of a requiem. A film with a quiet, resonating power with a story told in an old-fashioned way, reminding us that death is not for the dead but for the living. A beautifully life-affirming work.



RATING: A+