Sunday, June 28, 2009
A funny thing can happen when trying, with good intentions and a mostly open mind, to take in Academy Award winners in the Foreign Film category. Foreign film Oscars usually go to projects glazed with sentimental or simplistic character, able to appease the gods of feel-good, win people’s hearts, and possibly be remade in Hollywood. This year’s not-bad winner, the Japanese Departures, is an interesting and offbeat number about a frustrated cellist who takes a gig in the corpse-handling “encoffinment” business, yet its artistic credibility is undermined by a certain essential glossiness, embodied in the goopy tunes our hero plays on his cello.
A humble musician in Tokyo loses his job with a small orchestra, moves with his wife back to his small hometown, and takes a job “working with departures.” It turns out not to be travel-related, but all about the ritual of “casketing,” ceremonially dressing the body and placing it in a coffin before loved ones. Departures at times takes its place in parallel to other sardonic-comic films with warm hearts, including the death-defying Japanese comedy The Funeral and this year’s American charmer Sunshine Cleaning, a humorous tale of workers who deal with posthumous clients. As in that film, the dignity of the work comes into play, after initial heebie jeebies about dealing with the dead.
In an interesting narrative twist, Departures’ plot catches up to its opening scene, a comically awkward session with a corpse that is not what it appears to be. We laugh the first time around, but after being led through our protagonist’s transformation about the nature of his job, we have a wholly different perspective on the process. Along the way, the necessary philosophical ideas about death and grieving slip into the film.
While we may admire Departures’ assorted virtues and occasional moments of comedy, a question still nags: How did this film win over the obviously superior German nominee Der Baader Meinhof Komplex? Such second-guessing should be moot, except that the flow of “foreign” films onto arthouse big screens recently has been pinched, apace with constricting economic and cultural pipelines. Art-hungry minds want to know: Where in the world is the best world cinema?
For showtimes, check the Independent's movie listings, here.