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Departures
The surprise winner at this year’s Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Departures, directed by Yojiro Takita, is exquisite. It deals with death and the beauty that Japan’s culture insists upon before a person’s earthly remains are cremated and yet, as essential as the role is in this culture, it’s considered a shameful profession and one to be frowned upon.
Daigo (Japanese popstar Masahiro Motoki) is a cellist and after the orchestra he performs with is suddenly dissolved, he and wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) return to the home in northern Japan his late mother left him. He answers a job ad that states 'departures' and, thinking it a travel agency position, answers it. The job description is accurate enough but the job itself is ‘encoffinment’. The company attends to clients making their final journey and Daigo is initially aghast to discover not only what the owner, Mr. Sasaki (a wonderfully understated Tsutomu Yamazaki) does, but that it’s a business at all.
The role of a mortician, the cleaning and preparing of bodies and then made to look their best is hardly a new concept, but in the Japanese culture, the process takes place in front of the grieving family. What an intimate pleasure it is watching the preparation performed with the utmost respect and great reverence and as Daigo’s training proceeds we see more and more that it’s actually an art form. Like a ritual, it involves undressing and cleaning the departed behind modestly placed shrouds. Vaguely amused at his protégée’s initial reaction, Mr. Sasaki slowly convinces Daigo that he’s now part of a profession he was born to be involved in. Initially Daigo doesn't tell his wife about his new job such is their need for money and out of fear for what she’ll think. An old friend is appalled by it and turns away in disgust while clients, delighted by the final result, embrace the work; at one point, a father expresses his gratitude telling Daigo and Mr. Sasaki it helped him finally accept the true nature of his son.
It’s a remarkably serious job, one that demands concentration and self-control, yet Takita finds the humour in it. It’s never laugh-out-loud hilarious but gentle, gentle in every way. The way Daigo and Mika love each other, the way the dismayed Daigo adapts to his circumstances, the increasingly strange situations Mr. Sasaki leads Daigo into and then the final moment which features the greatest surrender of them all. There’s more to Departures, much more, but like any great film, it makes for a richer experience discovering the details first-hand. Evocatively filmed, beautifully scored, flawlessly acted and sensitively directed and finally, unique, Departures will be just that for audiences, a departure.
Michael Dalton
www.departures-themovie.com
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