The camera lies

Rating: 1/10 (28 July 2013)

Obviously this film is not the worst film ever. Camera work, actors, setting, even concept were all great. I could award it 5 stars out of 10 just to be fair. But in the days after watching it, the essential lie of the plot has been bugging me more and more, and I've started to outright detest it.
All of the good elements of this film can be found in the book "All Creatures Great and Small" by James Herriot. The down-on-his-luck virtuoso who goes to the countryside, visits many different kinds of families, and has to work for a forgetful and self-contradictory old man who in the end teaches him a lot about life. It's all there, so neglect this movie if you can and give that a read instead.
I know, what about the death part? Isn't that the real beauty of the movie? How death becomes an important moment of parting?
No... it looks beautiful, but that's the lie of the film. Consider that this guy's job is literally putting lipstick on a corpse. Yes, that sounds unpoetic and insulting to the film, but that's not an exaggeration. That's literally what he does.
All the bodies in this film appear to have keeled over and expired without injury. Real life corpses are not always so lucky. The suffering of death cannot always be whitewashed over like this. The traditional Buddhist meditation on death is on the destruction of the body, the disgusting things that happen when bodies decay. This film is doing something evil. It tells us to purchase a pound of make up and await the perfect funeral, when we can cry out our unresolved conflicts. Funerals are not meant to be perfect. Death in real life is not as convenient as it is to the plot of this film.
The ancients had death all around them, from untreated disease or violence. It is we of the 21st century who have no understanding of what it means for a life to have an end. The film gives a little taste of that during funeral scenes, but in such a warped way. It dresses up and masks the end so we can imagine that all our bodies can be cleaned up and exhibited with such dignity. The friends and relatives of the character, who exhibit distress over his choice of work, are correctly showing the cultural reaction of a traditional society that understands that a dead body is something apart from society. The film has no patience or sympathy for this reaction. It is portrayed as stupid, ignorant bigotry.
The reverse is true. We are the ones who are stupid and ignorant for inventing the false image of death portrayed in this film. The lie of the camera is so embedded into the fabric of this movie that I cannot justify giving it a good review.