From Fantasy to Funerals
The winner for best foreign film this year is Yojiro Takita's Departures. I saw this film while visiting Taiwan for this past Chinese new year. Departures was quite popular in Taiwan as well as most of Asia thanks to it's Buddhist theme of life and death, positive and negative actions, a gateway to another existence, what-have-you've-done-with-your-life-when-death-comes-knocking Ikiru-esque meditations. You would think the Japanese are tired of asking these questions in their films (See Paul's review of the criminally underrated The Funeral), but apparently the answers talented writers and directors have been giving are unsatisfactory. It was by chance that I decided to watch Departures. Up until my plane ride back, Yojiro Takita was under my radar; however, the first film that I saw of Takita holds the prestigious title of being the first date movie with the Wife, the black magic feudal Japan fantasy meets Sherlock Holmes shaman Onmyoji. Though Onmyoji hit theaters in Japan in 2001, it did not make it to the U.S. until 2003 when I saw it with the Wife on our 1st date at Piper's Alley in Chicago, I believe I still have the stub somewhere to get the exact date. After watching this film, I did more research and found out that Takita has been in the business for over 20 years, now approaching 30 years. I didn't think much of the style of Onmyoji, just your standard mixed genre where the occult meets religion mixed with action, a dash of politics, and of course romance (even some homoerotic sensibilities between the two male leads), of course romance, after all it's the Japanese. At the time, I can't say I really liked the attempt to mix genre's so wildly from different facets of the scale; but having revisit the film on video, I can see what Takita was shooting for, and to some extend, beautifully crafted with a few minor and unmentionable holes in the plot, but over all, not a bad personal introduction to Takita. Onmyoji was so successful in Japan that a sequel, creatively titled Onmyoji 2, wouldn't be too far behind. The hunky Mansai Nomura return as Abe no Seimei. Wife, having been and still is a Japanese drama (soap opera) expert, has a detail knowledge of stars, actors, actress and told me at that time that Mansai is considered to be quite the sought after actor and is known in the female circle as the "muscular guy." What is intriguing was not Takita's Onmuoji 1 and 2 but the film in between that should have caught the attention of the U.S. art film scene but was overshadowed by the success of Twilight Samurai which hit theaters 2 months before Takita's When the Last Sword is Drawn made it to Japanese theaters. So the success of one killed the possible success of the other. Having seen Yoji Yamada's follow up to Twilight, I might have to say that luck, not craftsmanship was the contributor to the success of Twilight, obviously Shuhei Fujisawa's beautiful novel and story helped a great deal. In retrospect and after Departures, my money is on Takita which seem to be better endowed with artistry and composition more than Yamada, if you have seen Twilight Samurai and was hoping Hidden Blade to be a better follow-up but was disappointed like me, pick up When the Last Sword is Drawn and your faith in reflective-existential-humanist samurai films will surely be reinvigorated. So the road leads to Departures.
So Masahiro Motoki play Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist in an orchestra that has just seen it's last day and like many people in the world, he finds himself jobless. Daigo then decides to move back to his hometown with his wife to look for work. He mistakes a job listed in the classified ads entitled "Departures" thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency, of course it's not. It's actually for a "Nokanshi" or "encoffineer," a "funeral professional" for a funeral home. While his wife and others despise the job due to the social stigma that comes with the title, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect the art of "Nokanshi," acting as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death, between the departed and the family of the departed. The film follows his profound and sometimes comical journey with death as he uncovers the wonder, joy and meaning of life and living...and of course we have all been bitten by these melodramatic Japanese humanist flares many times before, so if Departures got the Oscar, why not Hula Girls? What about Swing Girls? The Star Maker? Christmas on July 24th Avenue? Always? No? Nothing? Well, reason number one is that Takita had nothing to do with these other films; and that is the main reason as well. Takita has a fantastic sense of timing mixing irony with melancholy to bring sincere joy, not sentimentality, to a dreadful situation, which is the downfall of similar themed Japanese films. While other are too busy trying to milk tears artificially from your eyes, Takita doesn't let the story beat the tears out of you; rather, with a poker-faced direction and juxtaposition, accepts what responses naturally flows out of the viewer. He is not an emotional pornographer like most recent Japanese drama film directors; he has a very naturalistic style that pours out passionately to shows life and energy in mundane ritualized gestures of preparing lifeless bodies for the afterlife. There is passion and beauty in this irony, and Takita's genius is never to sells you his genius, but to let the characters and their actions do all the work naturally. A style without style, formless and transcendent, the likes of which have not been seen, at least by me, since Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes.
Labels: Digression: The Sunshine in the Cloudy Narrative
