Death's Comforters

Rating: 9/10 (18 December 2008)

I watched this movie on a Japanese Airlines flight from Tokyo to London having previously sat through James McAvoy and Angelina Jollie in the appalling and callous Wanted.
Nothing in Departures could be more different.
Here you see where the real pain of death lies: in those who are left behind. That every life come to an end is someone's brother, sister, mother, son, father, wife, lover or friend. And this is what is explored in the film through the story of Dagio, a cellist who, with his wife, returns to the family house he'd been left by his mother nine years before.
Needing a job, he becomes the assistant to a man who washes, dresses and applies make-up to corpses in a ceremony that each family witnesses. And on one level it's about the deepening relationship between Dagio and this man - a growing father to Dagio - whose real father left when Dagio was six and whose face he can no longer see in his dreams. But this mentor/father-figure, a man of maybe seventy, is also moving towards his own death, and in one beautiful moment, we see him asleep on a sofa and Dagio tenderly tucking him in with a blanket; in the same way they both tuck the ceremonial sheet under the corpses they wash and dress.
It is also a movie about forgiveness and understanding: a father finally breaks down, weeps and accepts in death his cross-dressing son; and Dagio's own wife begins, when she actually sees what he does, to appreciate the value of the 'unclean' and strange job he has got himself.
Even Dagio's relationship with his mother is examined. He was not there for her funeral, because 'he was abroad' at the time; we assume, touring with the orchestra which has recently been disbanded. And he begins to play music again, with a new understanding, and to remember himself as a boy playing the the little cello that his mother and father bought for him.
Because finally the film is about art. About the cello. About transcending life's pain and turmoil. I was often reminded, while watching the movie, of the Korean film 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring'. About cycles of struggle, failures, disappointments, beginnings and deaths. Hugely recommended.