Offers compassion and respect

Rating: 9/10 (21 June 2009)

If subtlety and nuance are what you are looking for in a film, Yojiro Takita's Departures may not be your cup of tea. If, however, you are willing to overlook the film's overly broad strokes and focus on its quiet dignity and the inner strength of its characters, it may strike a responsive chord. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, Departures is a film about the ritual of "encoffinment," the preparation of corpses before their cremation. While it teeters between serious drama and outright farce and often seemingly can't make up its mind what genre it belongs in, it is a film of understated elegance that will leave audiences in a mood of contentment.
In the opening sequence, a cello player in a Tokyo orchestra is shocked when the orchestra's owner announces after a poorly attended concert that the group has been disbanded. The cellist, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), has been playing the cello since childhood and knows no other profession. To compound his distress, he owes over $100,000 U.S. which he borrowed to purchase his cello, a purchase he now reveals to his wife Mika (Ryoko Hisosue) for the first time. With little choice, he sells the cello and moves back with Mika to his hometown in Northern Japan to the house left to him by his deceased mother, a house that has many memories for Daigo, still embittered by his father's abandonment of the family when he was only six years old.
Combing the want ads, Daigo answers an ad for a job in "departures" that does not require any experience. Thinking he is applying for work in a travel agency, he soon finds out that he will be an assistant to Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a master "nokanshi" who tells him that he works with the "departed" -washing, dressing, and placing the deceased into a coffin in the presence of bereaved friends and family. In a segment of physical comedy, Daigo must strip down to a pair of adult diapers to participate as the corpse in a training video. After that, he is initiated in the difficult task of casketing the body of an old woman who has been dead for more than two weeks, a most unpleasant task.
Gradually, Daigo learns the profession, utilizing the creative, artistic skills he learned as a cellist. Though "encoffinment" is an ancient ritual, apparently there is a stigma attached to working with the dead, and Daigo is rejected by a childhood friend Yamashita (Tetta Sugimoto), and then by Mika who discovers the training tape and packs her bag to return to Tokyo, telling her husband that she will return when he has a "normal" job. Starting to play the cello again after he discovers the first cello his father gave him as a child, Daigo is shown with his cello playing in the countryside surrounding his home and also plays "Ave Maria" for Sasaki and his secretary (Komiko Yo) at Christmas time.
Now performing ceremonies on his own, Daigo must deal with his own feelings of sadness when confronted with the death of people close to him. Departures has its share of clichés but touches the heart and has a calming effect. At first put off by the work he is asked to do, Daigo learns to appreciate the value of ritual and how comforting it can be to the loved ones of the deceased and he personally comes alive when seeing how his work touches others. Competing with summer blockbusters filled with bombast and brutality, it is good to see a film that offers compassion and respect for the dignity and worth of all people.