From someone who isn't a fan of foreign films

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2015)

I'm not a fan of foreign films and especially not Asian ones (speaking as a westerner). Recently I watched several Indian films which were enjoyable but they felt American and also unrefined.
This movie was different, it wasn't non-Western really, but it certainly wasn't non-Japanese. I felt like I was meaningfully connected with a culture I knew very little about and I was very honored to have seen this film.
The film tells the story of an emotionally stunted young man who is a cellist and suddenly finds that he is unemployed and must give up his love of music and quite despite himself finds something else he loves, sending the recently deceased on their way to the afterlife. But like the love of music, this is something many people cannot understand or tolerate in the young man. In many ways, his young wife doesn't understand him either and we are left to wonder if she ever will.
Yet this is not really an art film, not one of those films where everything is left unresolved, but it isn't all neatly tied up either. It's a deeply satisfying and encouraging film.
It reinforced something I have noticed about Asians in other contexts that there is a depth of beauty and emotion in Asian culture that as a westerner, I'm often tempted to dismiss or ignore because I can't easily understand it. Asians are "weird" to many Americans - but one has to ask why America should be the norm to the world? This movie was deeply encouraging, dealing with timely issues of fatherhood and marriage, and also subtly, the destruction of fatherhood in the world (which many of the newer Indian films are dealing with in another way).
Asians seem to have very deep connections to their families and traditions that are falling apart as the world becomes more "global" - but those undercurrents are still strong and offer hope to a world that is weary with competition, cynicism and disconnection from family, from our traditions, from others and from ourselves.