DEPARTURES
Directed by Yojiro Takita
Produced by Toshiaki Nakazawa
Written by Kundo Koyama
Released by Regent Releasing
Japanese with English subtitles
Japan. 131 min. Rated PG-13
With Masahiro Motoki, Ryoko Hirosue, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Kimiko Yo, Takashi Sasano, Kazuko Yoshiyuki & Tetta Sugimoto
 

Although a huge hit back home in Japan, Departures was overshadowed in the U.S. press by its fellow foreign-language Oscar nominees Waltz with Bashir and The Class. It was a surprise win—a  populist choice and a well-made weepy that, for the most part, earns its tears.

After his cash-strapped orchestra disbands, fortyish Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) packs in his career as a cellist, and leaves Tokyo with his wife for his hometown in the northeast. He settles back into his childhood home where his mother, now deceased, single-handedly raised him after his father abandoned the family. Besides aiming for the tear ducts, part of the film’s old-fashioned appeal is the idealization of small-town life, where everyone knows your name.

Looking for work, Daigo answers an ad to assist with “departures,” assuming it’s a travel-related job and somehow ignoring the coffins leaning against the office wall. He’s hired on the spot by the grandfatherly Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who gives Daigo a large advance, making it harder for him to turn down the job, what the film calls “casketing,” the precise cleansing (or purification), dressing, and grooming of the body for burial, in front of the grieving family. (Thankfully, no one mentions the word “destiny,” although Sasaki tells Daigo that he was born for the job.) Sasaki even pays him a bonus after his repellant first case, a corpse which has been rotting for two weeks.

We know that the sensitive Daigo will eventually find his footing; we have already seen his gentle side, as well as his artistic leanings. Earlier, his younger wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), brings home an octopus for dinner that, surprisingly, turns out to be alive. Rather than kill and eat it, he tosses it back into a nearby inlet. But embarrassed by his new line of work, he lies to his wife, leading her to believe he’s a travel agent. Once word spreads in town, even his childhood friend shuns him. Handsome and clumsy, Daigo is a likeable, quiet, and often bewildered observer, a suitable stand-in for the audience. However, Mika is a thoroughly retro role; she stays home while he brings home bacon. The script asks little of her other than to be bubbly, agreeable, and either loyal or severely judgmental.

Step by step, director Yojiro Takita takes the viewer by the hand as the initially hapless Daigo learns the ropes of his new trade, with his mentor explaining the significance of each ritual. In the episodic funeral scenes, the dead run the gamut from the young and beautiful to the well-lived, and the scenes from darkly comedic to tragic. It’s as if Takita aims to capture Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, and here the film is at its most resonant.

Departures works best when the camera is grounded, planted front and center of the ceremonial last rites, almost an acknowledgement that the rituals are a form of theater. In only a few incongruous sequences does the camera wildly take flight—with multiple crane shots while Daigo and his orchestra feverishly perform Ode to Joy, and later when, in a music-video detour, Daigo gets his groove back, playing his cello outdoors in a field with the snow-covered mountains as a backdrop. Even if some of the characters are written broadly, Takita restrains the cast, letting the inherent emotional pull of the story do most of the work, except for the very end, when Takita pulls out all the stops. Count on the first tear to fall by the 55-minute mark.  Kent Turner
May 29, 2009