The power of ritual in life and death

Rating: 9/10 (6 July 2009)

Masahiro Motoki is a good comic mime, a useful talent for depicting a Japanese in distress. He plays Daigo Kobayashi, a young cello player who faces the end of his chosen career when the Tokyo symphony orchestra he is part of is dissolved by its owner. He doesn't think he has the talent to get into another orchestra so he sells his expensive cello (which he's still paying for) and moves back to his town in the country. His wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) assents to this with brave smiles. There's a house there for them that his mother left him.
And then comes the job. Daigo answers an ad that's promising. "Departures," it says. He assumes something in travel. Easy hours, good pay. The boss hires him immediately and gives him a wad of bills. Only trouble: the work is "encoffination," or putting dead people into caskets for cremation. ("Departures" was a misprint for "Departed.") This is where Motoki gets to make funny faces as he struggles with surprise, discomfort, and out and out nausea. The first corpse his boss Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki) takes him along to work on is an elderly lady who was dead two weeks before she was found, and it's summertime. After this ordeal he can't face dinner without retching. He hides from his wife what he is doing. But the pay is good and the boss is a decent man and he needs work so he stays on.
In professional lingo Moviefone calls this movie "a feel-good dramady about death." Younger people, already sick of the Academy's easy Oscar choices, mocked its members for giving the Best Foreign prize this year to 'Departures' over the edgy Israeli animation about war trauma, 'Waltz with Bashir.' Yes, 'Departures' is softer; but it has depths and its subject is universal. I'd listen to the octogenarian wisdom of the veteran New York critic Andrew Sarris, who calls this "the most moving film I have ever seen commemorating the bonds between the living and the dead."
It's also a lesson in the beauty of Japanese tradition that expresses those bonds. Not so long ago, as Sasaki explains to Daigo, Japanese families prepared their own departed. Now the funeral agents and the casket preparers (Sasaki is the latter) have moved in. But the process still retains traditional honesty and grace. In a process both elegantly respectful and forthright, the body is prepared in front of the assembled family mourners by the funeral professionals. (Sasaki turns out to be a very good one.) In a series of graceful gestures. the body is wiped and cleaned, undressed, turned, and re-clothed, the face caressed, the hands smoothed and placed together just so, all with the deftness of motion that is the Japanese genius, and always discretely shielding the flesh of the deceased from the view of the watchers. Then, well wrapped, the body is gently laid in the casket. The mourners may come forward and say their goodbyes before the box is closed. Shortly thereafter it is taken to a crematorium. Daigo quickly masters the respectful drama of this process, particularly the way the face and hands are manipulated and the clothing is moved, and comes to appreciate the profound emotional meaning it has for the mourners. It's both a leave-taking of the person and an acknowledgment that the deceased is really already gone. Of course immensely complex feelings are involved. Daigo settles into the work. Nonetheless he continues to hide from Mika what he's doing.
When she finds out, she goes home to her mother, promising to return only when Daigo quits the job. But the way he enjoys playing his small but tuneful childhood cello again now shows he accepts his new circumstances and is not unhappy. Daigo's roots in the town are symbolized by the old bath house where he goes to cleanse himself after the dressing of the decomposing old lady on his first days's work. It is run by another old lady, Tsuyako (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), the mother of his former best friend. When she suddenly drops dead and Mika returns for the encoffination ceremony, she realizes the beauty and importance of the ritual Daigo performs for Tsuyako's family. Daigo's father ran a café in their house and went off with a young waitress when he was a boy, abandoning him and his mother. He hates his father and doesn't want to know anything about him. But when by chance -- or more accurately screenwriter Kundo Koyama's obvious arrangement -- he learns about his father's death, Mika pushes him to go and do the ceremony himself, with her at his side, and this time the ritual is a profound personal healing process for Daigo himself, whose tears pour down as he performs it. When a few months pass and winter comes Mika comes back to live with Diago after she discovers she's pregnant, even though she still wants him to quit the job. The film underlines how humble and traditional roles are essential to a society, even as it looks down on them, by showing the dignity of the encoffination process; of the man who handles the cremations; of old Tsuyako running the comfortable old bath house that her son wanted to close and turn into more profitable real estate.
This film is a tribute to the magic and comfort of human ritual. Hence the encoffination process is shown repeatedly, even behind the end credits. It's what the film is about: everything else is footnotes to this ceremony. Sometimes the mourners make it tumultuous, embarrassing, or comic. But it retains the beauty of a culture that knows the value of theater. Takita's movie is more than the sum of its sometimes sentimental or obvious parts. In the beauty of its most humdrum moments, with its focus on everyday family necessities (it celebrates food too), 'Departures' is not at all remote from the quintessentially Japanese quotidian grandeur celebrated in the film masterpieces of Yasajiro Ozu.