Rock music

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2009)

Daigo Kobayashi(Masahiro Motoki) paid eighteen million dollars for his cello before he realized there were "limits to (his) talents." Now that the orchestra is being dissolved, the musician quits the professional music world, and leaves Tokyo with his wife Mika(Ryoko Hirosue), but not before selling the cello to a dealer. The manner in which Daigo gives up his vocation so easily, makes it easy to agree with the unemployed cellist's assessment that being a musician "wasn't his dream after all." Daigo retreats to the small town he originated from without bothering to make the most basic fundamental overtures towards other philharmonics. As it turns out, the exorbitanly-priced instrument was probably an act of overcompensation, a ploy to conceal his cello envy from colleagues, and from himself. It's not that Daigo lacks talent(symphony orchestras don't hire hacks), but he lacks that deep-seated reverence for the music, and for the composer who laid down the notes on parchment: in other words, for the dead(a good musician performs a resurrection of the past when he sits down to play). "Okuribito" is about a man who goes through the motions before he learns the true meaning of "performance".
Understanding that his new job doesn't involve the execution of any travel agent duties, Daigo accepts this career change, casketing, skeptically, with mostly predictable results, as "Okuribito" finds the inherent(but obvious) comedy and drama in handling dead people. Is there vomiting? Check. Is there crying? Check. With Sasaki(Tsutomu Yamazaki) as his mentor, Daigo learns how to touch people, as he comes into their lives at the apex of heartbreak. Like baroque paramedics, family and friends gather around the two men as they transfer the body into its coffin, steeped in Buddhist ritualism. People with differing religious backgrounds have to concede that the mournful spectacle is dignified, compassionate, and genuinely moving. While the casketing student learns the ropes of his new trade, he rediscovers the cello, his first cello, that the young boy would play for his mother(now deceased), and father(who he hadn't seen for thirty years). The cello of his childhood isn't grand like the highly calibrated instrument he sold off, but it plays true, still. And through the course of Daigo's casketing mentorship and ensuing autonomy, he learns to play music with reverence once more. Like Fred Flintstone who used the ballet to improve his bowling, Daigo's attention to detail as a casketer has infused the fatherless man with a musician's intensity for making the notes of dead white men indelible against time.
At first, "Okuribito" seems bent towards black comedy, especially in the opening scene, played for laughs, as Daigo makes the discovery of a male appendage as he smooths the presumed girl's body with ceremonial clothing. Things get even more farcial in a scene where Daigo poses as a corpse for an instructional video. Later in the film, there's a payoff to this taping, in which the wife discovers her husband's profession at its most graphic, when Daigo's employer applies a cloth deep in his anus. (The wife's disapproval of her husband's occupation might be a commentary on the changing mores of contemporary Japanese.) Mildly amusing at best, "Okuribito" jars the audience with a melodramatic presentation of its protagonist's baggage(daddy issues), a slide into bathos already set in motion after some minor characters(the woman who runs a bath house, and one of her customers) take center stage in a prolonged funeral scene that's too earnest for its own good. As the body combusts into flames at the crematorium, so does "Okuribito", and it gets even more maudlin.
Out of touch with his father since early childhood, Daigo travels to a fisherman's co-op to preside over the old man's casketing. Eyes, blinking back tears, art and ceremonial function coalesce into one, as Daigo discovers one of the rocks they had exchanged on a beach, clutched in his father's leathery hand made stiff by rigor mortis, during a flashback propagated by the nostalgic-heavy sounds emanating from his first cello. Like something out of Phil Alden Robinson's "Field of Dreams", Daigo plays his father's favorite instrument to bring him back, albeit in memory. They don't have a baseball to throw around, but both father and son have matching rocks as a way of reconciling the past.